How Koos Bekker made his billions

As the title suggests, this is not precisely a biography of Koos Bekker. It’s a biography of the billions he made as an astute businessman whose instincts rivalled a leopard stalking its prey. He did not always make the kill, but when he did it was a case of feast over famine. And Strydom knows how to follow the spoor. 

For this reviewer, one of the things that stands out about Bekker — and it is not one of the 15 strategies that Strydom scrutinises — is that he is a big reader, and he reads a lot of history. As a historian by academic training, I like the point that history is useful. And Bekker’s reading of history led him to conclude that China was the future based on its past. The Asian giant was for centuries the world’s largest economy, a title it is on course to regain.

That explains Bekker’s gamble on Chinese tech company Tencent — regarded as one of the best investments so far in the 21st century — and why he held on to it at the poker table.

“For venture capitalists, a typical investment horizon is five to seven years. The idea is to find an exciting start-up, see it achieve scale, and sell, pocketing the profit,” writes Strydom. “During Bekker’s time as Naspers CEO, the company did not sell a single share in its most lucrative investment.”  

The reason was that Tencent’s value simply kept scaling new and dizzying heights, becoming Naspers’s defining asset. If the share price of Naspers was soaring or sinking, the first place an equities journalist, trader or analyst would look was Tencent. Nine times out of 10, Naspers’s performance reflected Tencent’s. Tencent’s Hong Kong listing, as Strydom points out, allowed investors to instantly value Naspers’s stake in its gleaming Chinese asset.

At the AGM in 2017, Bekker said Naspers had been advised in 2004 to sell its Tencent stake, when its share price was worth one Hong Kong dollar (HKD). Bekker went on to tell the AGM that there had been “agitation” in 2012 to sell at HKD 45.