So shareholders are dismayed that last year Mr van Dijk got a raise of 32%, to $2.2m. They say it is hard to see how much he is being rewarded for his own performance, and how much for that of Tencent. Although 79% of votes at the AGM were cast in favour of the pay policy, most are thought to have come from unlisted shares with special voting rights. Some of those shares are indirectly linked to company directors. Allan Gray, an influential asset manager, warned before the AGM that the pay policy was not aligned with shareholders’ interests. The majority of ordinary investors may have voted against. Mr Bekker, now the group’s chairman, swatted away any concerns. He compared corporate governance to star footballers washing their hands after going to the toilet: a nice idea, but less important than recruiting the best players for the team.
Shareholders have grumbled about pay at Naspers before, to no avail. The latest spat is more vocal and reflects deeper concern about its progress after two decades of reinvention. In the 1990s its prospects were uncertain. Founded in 1915 as Nasionale Pers (“National Press”), an Afrikaner nationalist publishing house, it was initially slow to acknowledge its long-time support of apartheid. With its roots in newspapers, it then had to adapt to the digital age. Mr Bekker refashioned it around new media, expanding its pay-TV business across Africa and investing in budding tech firms around the world.
Many of those investments have been slow to pay off. It was not long ago—the start of 2016—that Naspers was worth more than its Tencent stake but it is now worth less. The gap is widening. That may be because investors think Tencent’s shares, up by 70% since the start of the year, are overvalued, or because foreign capital is fleeing South Africa’s turbulent politics. But some see it as a sign that investors are losing patience with Naspers. Its e-commerce division posted trading losses of $731m last year. “The market has become increasingly disillusioned with the ability of management to pull rabbits out of the hat,” says Mark Ingham, an independent analyst.
Even the firm’s popular pay-television service, which has 12m subscribers across Africa, is struggling, because of tumbling local currencies that make buying American content more expensive, and fiercer competition from firms such as Netflix and StarTimes, a Chinese rival.
