[Book Review] How Naspers Boss Koos Bekker made his Billions – Report

Billionaire businessman, founder and chairperson of Naspers Koos Bekker is one of those successful individuals this country [South Africa] has produced and celebrated. He also co-founded M-Net/MultiChoice and was a founding director of telecommunications company MTN.

Recently, Talk Radio 702 host Bruce Whitfield spoke with financial journalist T.J. Strydom about his book “Koos Bekker’s Billions”. 

Here are some of the bits and pieces of Whitfield and Strydom’s interview about the book “Koos Bekker’s Billions”. 

“I wanted to understand who is the guy behind M-Net… obviously much later we got to know him as the guy who steered Naspers towards finding the ‘bet of the century’ in Tencent. I wanted to understand how he operated; how he got into the position; what happened…”

“Ton Vosloo [former Naspers chair] was the entry point to getting Nasionale Pers behind Bekker. To get a license to broadcast in South Africa in the 1980s you need to be politically connected, and that’s what Naspers brought with it… Ton knew all the big players and Naspers was this behemoth, so this was the delivery mechanism for starting this whole journey…”

“Then there was the turn of the century and the dotcom crash… Naspers started throwing serious money at whatever was in the tech sector… By 2001/2002, Koos reported its first-ever loss according to Naspers… How do you come back from that?” 

To listen the entire podcast click here. 

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