Naspers results beat expectations, with strong surge in their internet businesses

Righto, Naspers have reported their full year numbers for the full year to end March 2012 this morning. This business is essentially four parts, first the pay TV part, which is DSTv across the continent with the larger home base here. Then there is the internet segment which is the fastest growing and most misunderstood part, which consists of stakes in TenCent, Mail.ru and various e-commerce businesses that are the biggest revenue generators (for that segment). The print media might be a smaller contributor than the two mentioned above and is essentially the old part of their business. The split inside of this segment consist of Media24, Abril (their Brazilian print media business) and MIH Print, which I suspect includes Jonathan Ball Publishers and Paarl Media.


And then there is a smaller part of their business, the smallest, "technology", which is a business known as irdeto, which is headquartered in Amsterdam and Beijing and as per the Naspers website "is a global software security and media technology company trusted by the world's leading content owners and distributors and device manufacturers to enable new forms of broadcast, broadband and mobile entertainment."

Most of the highlights I am going to base on the presentation, which you can download here to have a look at the same material -> Naspers Financial results presentation. Revenue for the group for the full year increased by 19 percent to 39.5 billion Rand, driven by a 15 percent increase in the pay TV segment and a 59 percent jump in the internet businesses. Print media managed to grow overall revenues by 12 percent. Core HEPS (their key metric) increased 15 percent to 18.50 ZAR per share. The dividend jumped a healthy 24 percent, but is still only at 335 cents after this jump. Whilst this business is in ramp up mode, expect the dividend flow to be modest relative to the share price. EBITDA was down a disappointing 3 percent to 7 billion Rand, the biggest drop being in the SSA segment inside of pay TV, that was down 12 percent, currency related is my best guess, will get to that later. But the main reason given for the overall number being lower in the presentation was "impact of expensing growth initiatives". Consolidated development costs clocked 2.8 billion Rand in the 2012 financial year and that is comfortably ahead of the 1.5 billion Rand for the 2011 year.


Here is a rather "nice" graphic to visualise the opening two paragraphs, this is the segment that explains the e-commerce side of their business. Here goes, all the brands and names that you might or might not know:

And then there is the explanation of why EBIDTA was lower than the prior period, they expensed much higher development projects, associated with their e-commerce businesses, which you can see are plentiful. The last two half year periods, H1 2012 and H2 2012 were the highest development spend as percentage of spend in the last five years. Koos Bekker never sits still, but we like that about him.

The valuation part is always the trickiest part when trying to determine what Naspers should, and should not trade at. For instance, what would you pay for a pay TV business that is growing profits and revenues in the middle to low teens? 10 to 13 times earnings would be a fair value to apply to these assets, the pay TV segment generated 6.331 billion Rands worth of trading profits, so roughly you could say that this business is worth 70 billion Rands, and that is a conservative valuation. I never complain about my DSTv service, they are nothing short of brilliant. Their print business has margins below ten percent, but still managed to improve trading profits significantly, a 25 percent improvement on last year to 1.09 billion Rand. So what would you pay for that business? 7 to 10 billion Rands does not sound out of order at all. Those are two parts of the business that we know pretty well, so it is fair to say that we are currently at 80 billion Rands so far.


And then the part that always seems to deliver market participants and analysts alike with a Shane Warne flipper to Daryll Cullinan (two superb cricketers, one a genius, you pick) is how to value the internet assets. I suspect it is as easy as letting the respective markets determine the value and then take the value to Naspers. Both TenCent and Mail.ru have quoted prices and as such, this should be easy. First things, probably the biggest part, and the future (for now), TenCent. The stock is listed in Hong Kong, and trades under the pretty cool ticker 0700. In Hong Kong the tickers are all numbers, confusing I know. 0700 closed at 226 Hong Kong Dollars per share, valuing the whole company at 415.8 billion Hong Kong Dollars, according to Google Finance. One Hong Kong Dollar equals 1.086 Rand. So, on that currency conversion, TenCent has a market cap of 451.56 billion Rand. And Naspers own 34.26 percent of the business, according to the TenCent annual report from 2011. The exact number of shares is 630,240,380. And that then makes it easy to work out, with the exchange rate and TenCent price available, the stake is worth 154,683,677,906 Rands. Or just 154.7 billion Rands.


On our rolling additions so far we come to 234.7 billion Rand. Let us add in Mail.ru to this list. Naspers own 29 percent of this asset (through MIH), according to the mail.ru annual report for 2011. There was a swap of an asset remember for a bigger stake in this parent company. Although much smaller than TenCent, the company still has a market capitalisation of 4.911 billion pounds as per the London Stock Exchange -> MAIL.RU GROUP LIMITED. So, in Rands, at an exchange rate of 13.15 to the GBP, that is 64.58 billion. And 29 percent of that is 18.73 billion Rands. So, add them all up to that running total and you get roughly 253.5 billion Rands. The current market cap of Naspers is around 190 billion Rands.

But the question that many people ask, does TenCent deserve to be on a 33 times earnings multiple? And that is perhaps why the Naspers discount is applied, but basically these other businesses, including the exciting e-commerce business are the cream. But the business is not without its risks, they made some serious purchases last year for blue sky (260 million Dollars in total), but if you are going to back a team, they are great. And remember that sadly they lost a core member of the team over the weekend with the passing of Antonie Roux, that was a bit of a shock for everyone.


The outlook segment basically tells me that Naspers are going to carry on doing what they do. And just be Naspers, buying nerds businesses and flattering them with the price. And to keep rolling out the DSTv business across the continent and closer to home, that business is simply amazing. It is difficult to value, but we continue to believe that the market does not appreciate the company. I am not going to use the line that it should trade higher, the level today represents the balance of buyers and sellers. And the stock price is two percent plus higher on a day that the whole market is slightly lower. We continue to accumulate the stock at current levels.