Naspers valuations

I have seen a couple of notes on Naspers and what most folks expectations are in the coming 12 to 18 months (I know, almost anything could happen), but the ones that I have seen so far are fairly bullish. The main theme is that the valuation afforded to it by the market is wrong, and in due course the market should rerate the stock. Now remember last week when I was disgusted with Remgro for telling me where and what the value is. Here it is not the company telling us (in fact Koos Bekker suggested that he was happy with the valuation of TenCent and Mail.ru in a wireless interview) but rather the analyst community. That, I think is the subtle difference.

Have a look at the Naspers presentation from yesterday, I hacked a nice slide to show you their internet assets around the world, makes for interesting viewing.

And then I promised an overview, but wait, the great investor relations people (Meloy Horn, an ex analyst runs that show) at Naspers have done that already for me. And you. And others. Check out the Naspers group structure via a presentation titled: A leading emerging market multi-media company

Notice that the print assets sit out to the right there. The internet, pay TV and technology assets sit out to the left and are the rump of the business. Don't count the print assets out, they are still a very profitable businesses, but hey, nothing being bought there. The vision part is pretty simple, but nevertheless important: "Providing entertainment, information, trading opportunities and access to communities and friends wherever the users might be."

We continue to think that they are undervalued at these levels. Some might say otherwise. We are happy, like the company with their holdings and the pace at which they are growing. And TenCent has been around for a long time, the stock really started to gain traction in the middle of 2007. That is the hard part I guess for many local analysts, too easy to say, oh well that TenCent is overvalued, therefore Naspers is too. But the fact that TenCent has 670 million odd subscribers and their single biggest concurrent user logins topped 137 million users (which is bigger than the whole population of Japan) once, well that is pie in the sky stuff. In fact concurrent users of TenCent, at the height, would be the 10th most populous in the world.

I am going to travel there soon. China that is. I have used TenCent, not really that useful for me because I am not in Beijing or Shanghai. I am here. I get to use pricecheck and Kalahari.net. And have a decoder, which I like a lot. My family likes it too, they all have their favourites.