KOOS BEKKER

Koos Bekker grew up in Lydenburg, a small mining town in what is now Mpumalanga, South Africa. He studied law at Stellenbosch University before heading to Columbia Business School in New York for his MBA in the early 1980s.

That Columbia training — steeped in fundamental business analysis — shaped how he thought about long-term value, even though his investments would eventually look nothing like orthodox value investing.

He joined Naspers in 1985, when it was a traditional Afrikaner newspaper publisher. He helped develop its pay-TV business, which became MultiChoice and DStv — one of the most profitable satellite TV platforms on the African continent.

By 1997, he was CEO. From that position, he did something almost nobody expected: he turned a print media company into one of the most aggressive internet investors on the planet.

The key move came in 2001. Bekker led Naspers to invest $32 million for a 46.5% stake in Tencent, a Shenzhen-based company that was essentially China's MSN Messenger at the time.

Most people thought it was a strange choice. Nobody thought it was the deal of the century.

Over the next two decades, Tencent built WeChat — China's super-app used by over a billion people — alongside the world's largest gaming portfolio and a sprawling investment empire. Naspers's stake, diluted over time to around 26%, became the most valuable internet investment ever made by a non-US company.

Naspers's European assets, including its Tencent holding, were spun off into Prosus NV, listed on Euronext Amsterdam in 2019.

Bekker stepped down as CEO in 2014 but remained as chairman. He had built something that would have been impossible to explain in 1997: a South African media company sitting on a stake in one of the world's most powerful technology businesses.

Naspers is where Bekker spent his career. He transformed it from a South African print media company into an internet holding company with a market cap that at one point exceeded $100 billion.

The crown jewel is the Tencent stake — Naspers paid $32 million for it in 2001, and it eventually became worth more than the entire value of Naspers itself, creating one of the most famous valuation anomalies in investing history.

Prosus NV is the European spin-off of Naspers's international internet investments, listed in Amsterdam in 2019. It holds the Tencent stake along with investments in food delivery (iFood in Brazil, Swiggy in India), online classifieds (OLX), and fintech (PayU).

Prosus is one of the largest technology investors in Europe by market capitalization.

MultiChoice is Naspers's pay-TV business that Bekker helped build in the early 1990s. It operates DStv, the dominant satellite TV platform in sub-Saharan Africa, with over 20 million subscribers.

This business generated the cash that allowed Bekker to make his internet bets.

Meituan is a Chinese food delivery and lifestyle services company that Naspers/Prosus backed early. Meituan went public in Hong Kong in 2018 and became one of China's most valuable companies.

OLX is an online classifieds platform operating in 45+ countries — a substantial but ultimately disappointing bet compared to Tencent.

Bekker is a patient, conviction-driven investor who focuses on internet businesses in markets where adoption is just beginning. His thesis has always been simple: the internet will do in emerging markets what it did in developed countries, just five to ten years later.

Getting there first, with long-term capital and genuine patience, is the entire game.

He doesn't try to pick every winner in a sector. He picks one or two companies per market and holds for a very long time.

With Tencent, he held through years when the position was questioned. He didn't sell when it became a 10x.

He didn't sell when it became a 100x. He held until it was a 6,000x return, and he still mostly held.

He thinks about competitive position — can this company become the default choice in its category and stay there? WeChat became so embedded in Chinese daily life that displacing it became practically impossible.

That's the kind of business he looks for: one where the longer you wait, the more the position compounds.

The Tencent investment is one of the greatest single investment decisions in the history of finance. In 2001, Naspers paid $32 million for a 46.5% stake in Tencent Holdings, a young Chinese company that mostly made messaging software.

The people who passed on that deal didn't know what they were missing — Tencent wasn't obviously special yet.

Over the next two decades, Tencent built WeChat (used by over one billion people), Tencent Gaming (the world's largest gaming company by revenue), and invested in hundreds of other tech businesses including Snap, Spotify, and Riot Games. Naspers's stake — diluted to around 26% by 2023 — was still worth well over $100 billion.

At its 2021 peak, the Tencent stake was worth over $200 billion. That is roughly 6,250 times the original $32 million.

No Western internet fund has ever produced a comparable return on a single position. The fact that it came from a South African newspaper company makes it one of the most extraordinary stories in investing history.

OLX was supposed to be the global classifieds empire. Naspers spent billions acquiring and expanding the online classifieds platform across 45+ countries, betting that what Craigslist did in the US would replicate everywhere.

They put serious capital into building dominant positions in India, Brazil, Russia, Eastern Europe, and Southeast Asia.

It never quite worked. OLX faced intense local competition in most markets, struggled to monetize its traffic, and couldn't build the kind of durable competitive position that Tencent had.

The platform became more valuable for the market share it held than the profits it generated. Naspers eventually restructured significant parts of the OLX business and merged some operations, acknowledging the original thesis didn't play out.

The lesson is one that even great investors learn the hard way: a playbook that worked brilliantly once doesn't automatically work every time. The Tencent bet was special partly because Tencent was special — not just because the market was.

Bekker's core belief is that the internet is still early in its global adoption — even decades in — and that markets consistently underestimate how dominant a category leader can become. He invests in businesses that can become default infrastructure in their market, the way you don't think about which messaging app or search engine to use.

You just use the one that won.

He also believes geographic arbitrage is one of the most underexploited edges in investing. Going to markets where capital is scarce but opportunity is abundant — China in 2001, India in the 2010s, Brazil, Eastern Europe — lets you buy at prices that developed-market investors would never see.

The competition is lower. The valuations are lower.

And the long-term potential can be the same.

He is deeply skeptical of quarterly thinking. He ran Naspers for decades on the belief that the right investment horizon is years, not quarters.

He negotiated his own CEO compensation entirely in company stock rather than salary, which meant his interests were aligned with long-term shareholders in the most literal way possible.

Bekker is married to Karen Roos, one of South Africa's most recognized travel writers and the former editor of Condé Nast Traveller UK. They have been together for decades and maintain a private family life — unusual for someone of Bekker's stature in global business.

They have children, though he has kept his family firmly out of media attention.

He spends time between South Africa (the Cape winelands farm) and the Netherlands (where Prosus is listed and where Naspers runs significant operations). He was born in Lydenburg but has spent a meaningful portion of his adult life across continents.

He is fluent in Afrikaans and English.

Bekker studied law at Stellenbosch University in South Africa, one of the country's most prestigious universities. He then went to Columbia Business School in New York for his MBA.

Columbia at that time was deeply influenced by the value investing tradition — with links to professors trained under Benjamin Graham. That foundation, understanding businesses as long-term assets rather than short-term trades, shaped everything he did at Naspers, even when his specific investments looked nothing like classic value investing.

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