Slowly but surely Naspers have been deploying their excess cash from the sale of some Tencent shares last year. On Friday Naspers said they bought out minority shareholders in a business called Avito, a Russian classifieds business. The investment was worth US$1.16 billion, at an implied enterprise value of US$3.85 billion, to acquire a further 29.1% stake in Avito which will fall within the OLX group for Naspers.
Naspers is clearly going long classifieds in a big way. They are consolidating businesses around the world who have managed to achieve some sort of scale. Apparently they want to push these businesses all on to one platform. Just like Uber and Airbnb, an online aggregator in the classifieds space needs to achieve scale for the service to work best. At this stage it is a race for the real estate.
You can read more about the deal in this Fin24 article titled Naspers sees single global classifieds focus amid Avito deal