The Naspers stable has added almost R550bn to its market value so far in 2025, underpinning an impressive performance by local tech stocks on the JSE so far this year.
Naspers/Prosus CEO Fabricio Bloisi, who has been in the job for 10 months, has continued to reduce the gap between the value of the group’s intrinsic assets — driven largely by its stake in Tencent — and its market valuation, premised on the growth of Naspers/Prosus e-commerce with the biggest share buyback scheme yet seen on the JSE.
Unlike his predecessors, Bloisi has ambitions of building an e-commerce powerhouse in Europe, a region that many peers have relegated to the sidelines for lacking in opportunity and innovation. The Brazilian national is equally bullish, if not more so, about fresh opportunities brought on by the growth of AI.
The strategy appears to be bearing fruit as the Naspers boss recently penned a letter to investors informing them that Prosus will report adjusted earnings before interest and tax of more than $430m for its e-commerce portfolio for the 2025 financial year, exceeding its goal of $400m.
Over the years, management has been attempting to unlock value from its vast portfolio of businesses in food delivery, classifieds, fintech and education that are valued at about $30bn but are not fully reflected in the Prosus share price.
Still, the value of units such as PayU, Brazil’s iFood, Germany’s Delivery Hero and India’s Swiggy are dwarfed by the group’s stake in Tencent, the Chinese-based technology and entertainment conglomerate, valued at $141bn according to data compiled by MarketScreener, the financial news and data platform.
Naspers shares gained 2.1% to R5,085.54 on Friday, a record high, and are up 23.6% so far this year. Prosus has gained 21.8%. That amounts to a gain of R159.33bn for Naspers and R385.58bn for Prosus — a combined R544.9bn.
That is slightly better than Tencent, which is up 18.9% this year in Hong Kong.
Naspers holds just more than 24% of Tencent via Amsterdam-listed Prosus.
The group is not alone in its good fortune as 2025 has been good for a number of JSE tech counters. Blue Label Telecoms has increased 48.6%, iOCO (formerly EOH) is up 38.52% and Datatec is 25.21% firmer since January.
While Altron is down 1.71% this year, the share has enjoyed an impressive run in the past 12 months, adding 93%. A similar trend is seen with the likes of Cartrack owner Karooooo and Mustek.
Naspers’ ongoing share buyback programme has certainly helped relations with investors.
“I am happy to say that our biggest investment to date has been in ourselves and in the future of Prosus through our share repurchase programme,” Bloisi said. “We have returned over $35bn across the group since the beginning of the programme and shrunk the free floats of Prosus by 27% and Naspers by 25%.”
In a tech landscape increasingly defined by AI, Prosus is fighting to position itself as a “leader operating at the intersection of marketplaces and AI innovation”.
The group’s investment in the area include “Corti which develops AI systems for healthcare use cases; Zapia, an all-in-one AI assistant built for Latin America accessible via WhatsApp; Altera which is an applied research company building AI agents for open-ended computer use; and Taktile which is a platform that empowers risk experts by using AI to build, monitor and optimise automated risk outcomes for payment and finance,” Bloisi said.
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