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Naspers sees its suite of newly developed AI tools as the best way to improve and grow the businesses it invests in, helping to unlock the value of holdings beyond China’s Tencent.Since taking the helm at Naspers/Prosus in mid-2024, CEO Fabricio Bloisi has won favour from those investors who see his entrepreneurial track record as the energy the group needs to be a globally relevant technology operator and investor. Conversely, some see Bloisi’s approach as unnecessarily risky. This week, the JSE’s largest technology group unveiled ToqanClaw, a platform that lets business owners develop their own software solutions without the need for complex technical teams or third-party developers. When Bloisi took the reins at the JSE’s largest tech player in mid-2024, he ushered in a new chapter that saw the group and its international unit Prosus moving away from a somewhat “passive” investor stance to becoming an operator of the various companies in its portfolio.The Brazilian businessman recently described the group’s shift from an e-commerce giant to a “global-class AI company”.At its core, the shift has seen the group going from tech investor to e-commerce operator to AI platform. “When I joined Prosus a couple of years ago, that was always the hot topic. Are you an investor? Are you an operator? And we were always lukewarm between the two,” said Laura Fitoussi, global director of strategy and operations at Prosus. She told Business Day that Bloisi’s approach has returned the group to its roots as an operator. “Naspers was not an investment company to start with. It was very much an operating business,” she said. “The reason we will continue to invest is to benefit our ecosystem and what we’re building out. Now, if we are to grow our ecosystem, we also need to build products to create more opportunities for our businesses, so that’s what we’ll do.“No one has that data that we have, so we need to leverage it as Prosus from a central point to be able to deploy it across our companies and our partners.”All this falls into the broader strategy of growing the value of its e-commerce portfolio, ex-Tencent, while closing the gap between its share price and underlying assets. For the first time in the two decades that the group has operated as primarily a tech investor, the Naspers stable is now developing and offering its own AI platforms to the market.Kold Investments, a shareholder in Prosus, is not a fan of the new approach. The Danish firm, led by Simon Kold, believes it has “a straightforward, low-risk way to maximise long-term net asset value per share: maximise NAV [net asset value]-per-share accretive buybacks, while embracing the obvious economic reality that Prosus is a decentralised holding company whose value is primarily made up of its Tencent stake”.Instead, “Prosus appears to be pursuing what we regard as a self-deceptive strategic miscalculation of becoming a centralised global ‘tech company’. “In our view, management is attempting to reshape a collection of unrelated and economically secondary businesses around a corporate identity that, in our view, does not reflect the economic reality of Prosus’s asset base.”It makes sense why the likes of Kold have reservations. Share buybacks have generated a $34bn (R561bn) windfall for investors since June 2022. Such risk-averse shareholders are looking to protect a tried-and-tested line of Tencent-backed dividends and cash flow: maximise returns while minimising risky bets that could derail that gravy train. Kold aired its displeasure through an open letter to Prosus management in the form of a fairy tale, “The Prosus Emperor’s New AI Clothes”.
