The media index surged as Naspers rocketed

Who, when, why, what? Session end the all share closed near the top end of the day, 29779 points, 32 points better on the day. The media index surged as Naspers rocketed. More on that in just a touch. Platinum stocks were a percent and a half lower.




Paul was on the wireless last evening, the World at six on 702. Talking about Naspers. Check out the podcast, listen to the piece Where to for Gold and Mail.Ru hoists Naspers' shares to record. You have to listen to some normal market stuff first. Quite a lot of stuff, sorry, what you are looking for is at the end of the podcast. Fast forward to 12:20 on the time at the bottom to get straight to the interview.



OK, so what is up with Naspers? Sadly it was not our recommendation a couple of days ago, but rather the listing of one of their indirect asset, Mail.ru filing with the London Stock Exchange for listing. This is why it was up yesterday, five percent. What is not entirely clear as Paul points out, is whether or not the whole of the DST business is going to be listed. From our recommendation just two days ago:

In 2006, Naspers made an initial investment in Mail.ru, Russia's most prominent internet property, similar to Google's Gmail. Since then, they invested more funds, bought a gaming site called Astrum, and switched their stake into a 30% position in a company called Digital Sky Technologies (DST).



DST is run by Yuri Milner and Gregory Finger. Fortune magazine recently profiled them.



In addition to the Russian properties, DST owns a 10% stake in Facebook. Of all of the venture capitalists sniffing around the giant US social networking business, founder Mark Zuckerberg chose to allow Milner to take a small stake in exchange for cash. Since then DST has increased its stake to around 10% by buying shares sold by Facebook staff, spending an estimated $800m to date. When Elevation Partners recently invested $120m in Facebook, that deal put the company's value at $23 billion, implying that DST's investment has almost trebled.


Facebook now has more than 500 million active users. Apparently over 50% of their active users log on to Facebook in any given day. There are more than 150 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices. People that use Facebook on their mobile devices are twice as active on Facebook than non-mobile users.