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.

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“… and again today at HKD 325 people want us to sell. We think the price is going up, and that this is the best opportunity for our cash at the moment,” Strydom quotes Bekker as saying. And that it did, reaching a peak of over HKD 750 early in 2021. It has since fallen below HKD 300, but that hardly detracts from Bekker’s 2017 forecast.

As Strydom notes, Bekker and his team had “lassoed a unicorn.” Tencent is central to “strategy 7,” which is: “Hold in when you have something great.” 

Still, this one had a double-edged horn. Strydom writes that one of the consequences of the Tencent stake was that Naspers’ share price from 2015 began trading at an expanding discount to its Chinese unicorn.

“Simply put: in 2017, when Naspers was worth over $85-billion, its stake in Tencent was worth more than $110-billion. This means in effect that the rest of the market ascribed a negative value to the rest of Naspers’s assets!”, Strydom writes.

This reviewer has been a financial journalist in South Africa for around two decades, but Naspers was never part of my “beat”, so I have learnt a lot from this book. Readers with a more detailed knowledge of the company will still get mileage out of it, though perhaps not as much.

Other Bekker strategies examined by Strydom include “Don’t get caned for corporate governance” and “Dance with the devil”. The two are linked and the latter refers to the penchant Naspers has shown for investing “in some rather authoritarian parts of the world” such as Russia and China. In fairness to Naspers, stacks of companies around the world do so, though many have now come to rue their Russian investments, as has Naspers. But in an age when ESGs or environmental, social and governance concerns are all the corporate rage, expect such strategies to be subjected to increasing investor scrutiny. 

Koos Bekker’s Billions is a worthy contribution to the rich literature on South African business and economic history. DM/BM

(Disclosure: Ed Stoddard and TJ Strydom were former colleagues at Reuters and know each other personally).