Naspers Full Year Results with CEO Koos Bekker

In Russia and China, we have an interest, as you know, in Mail.Ru and Tencent, respectively. They offer quite wide-ranging services. Both of them have portals, instant messaging, emails, games, social networks — all of that. In the rest of the world, we focus on e-commerce. So our expansion in Brazil, Eastern Europe, or India is solely now focused on e-commerce, and in that are lots of new products. If you want to sell your puppy, you basically need a classified to do it. If you want to buy a new iPad, you may need something looking like Amazon. And if you want to compare prices, you have a price comparison engine like PriceCheck. So e-commerce is not a single thing — it's a cluster of many activities, and that's where the innovation takes place.

I don't think there's a price bubble generally in the internet today. In fact, quite established companies like Google or Yahoo or eBay are trading at what I regard as discounts — they're cheap. It's not a general euphoria like there was in 1999. I think there's some countries overvalued — maybe Brazil, India — you look at the valuation and you just say this discount is pricing in too much good news. But it's localized. I wouldn't say it's globally the case.

I think the Chinese economy is still expanding. Many people expect it to grind to a halt, but I don't see signs of that. I think it'll slow down because China is basically the factory of the world at the moment, and as Europe can afford fewer washing machines, China will produce fewer — so that'll have a negative effect. But there's something else happening in China, which is that the Chinese are consuming more. They used to eat meat once or twice a week 30 years ago; today they tend to eat meat almost every day. That has to be produced — it creates an internal market. As they grow richer, they consume more. Our engineers in China are earning almost as much as an engineer in the US or Europe — that wasn't the case 20 years ago. So China is growing, salaries are higher, the economy internally is more buoyant. And basically, Tencent doesn't export from China — it actually serves the Chinese market from China. So what matters to it is the health of the indigenous market more so than the export market.

Not really. The business we have an interest in, Mail.Ru, is listed in London and we have a stake in it, but we're not a controlling shareholder. I think in Russia there's quite a lot of sensitivity around resources — so if you're an oil company, there are all sorts of nationalistic debates going on. It's not true of the rest of the economy. We've always felt welcome, and I think we don't see any risk there.

I think the next year is going to be exciting. In the past, if you were living in Kenya and you're a teacher at the local school, if you wanted all these wonderful channels — Discovery Channel, Disney, whatever — you needed to go to a shop and buy a dish, then contract an installer to come and install it professionally, then buy a decoder. So it's quite a convoluted process of getting pay TV. What's happening now is we're rolling out digital terrestrial television, which is a transmitter on a hill broadcasting about 16 channels, and that's much cheaper. You go to a shop, you buy a decoder for about 500 rand, you plug it in — no professional installation. So for Sunday night's Euro final, you can buy your decoder Saturday afternoon, plug it in, and get going immediately. We then provide the service at a much lower rate — typically seven or eight dollars. So I expect a lot of growth. The same is not true for South Africa — I see quite little growth in South Africa because DTT is not licensed and isn't going to be licensed quickly. But the rest of Africa, yes.

Yes. Like any other sector of the economy, it's dependent upon the general health of the economy, and as people get more despondent, you'll find sales slowing. So if I look at the year ahead, I feel the rest of Africa might be a lot more buoyant than South Africa.