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Today, I’ll be telling you the story of how an 85-year-old newspaper company accidentally created one of Africa’s biggest tech ecosystems.

It’s a wild, long story.

But before we get started, I have some good news…

Let’s get into today’s edition…

That stake is worth more than $100 billion today.

That company was Naspers, and at the time, it had never built a piece of software in its life.

The timing made it stranger still. Tech stocks had just lost half their value in the 2000-2002 dot-com crash, which wiped $5 billion from the stock market and saw over 4,000 tech companies shut down.

Most investors had decided the internet was a lesson.

But Naspers saw an opportunity. It had spent the previous fifteen years learning the exact thing that made the bet possible, and most of that learning came from failing.

Naspers was founded in Stellenbosch in 1915 as “De Nasionale Pers Beperkt”, or The National Press Limited. 

Its first newspaper, Die Burger, was the voice of Afrikaner nationalism, and two of its editors went on to become Prime Minister of South Africa and write apartheid into law.

The company took a long time to reckon with that. In fact, it wasn’t until 2015 that Naspers issued a formal apology, at its centenary.

So for most of its first century, Naspers was a political project that happened to own printing presses. Nothing about the company suggested a future in technology, let alone one in China.

Then, in the mid-1980s, the money started running out.

By 1984, newspaper revenue was falling, and Naspers needed something new. 

It found the answer in Koos Bekker, a former lawyer who had just returned from Columbia Business School, where he had written his thesis on subscription television modelled on HBO.

When he moved back to South Africa, he decided to team up with two friends and start a company based on his thesis. TV was only eight years old in South Africa at this point.

Koos called the company M-Net, and pitched it to his old bosses at Naspers; not as a tech business, but as a way for them to recapture advertising.

Naspers liked the idea and promoted it to three other big media groups in South Africa. Together, they formed a consortium and invested in M-Net, but Naspers took the biggest share; roughly 26%.

M-Net launched in 1986, broadcasting movies 12 hours a day to 500 homes with decoders. A year later, M-Net was in 50,000 homes, after getting rights to air a Rugby tournament.

By 1989, it had reached 100,000 homes and launched SuperSport, a channel dedicated to showing sporting events worldwide. A year later, it got listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange. And by 1992, it expanded to 20 African countries.

M-Net grew fast, but in 1993 the company split in two.

One division managed the entertainment channels, while the other one managed the infrastructure that handled signal transmission and subscriber management.

The first one retained the name M-Net, and the second one became known as MultiChoice. 

The MultiChoice arm created a cable television product known as DStv. If you grew up in Africa, you’ve definitely heard of it.

Here’s another side-lore about Multichoice: it incubated a division that became MTN Group.

In 1997, Multichoice had a division known as M-Cell, a telecoms financier.

It held a 25% stake in MTN Holdings, a young mobile network operator, and a 75% stake in M-Tel, a company selling airtime and handsets.

By 1999, it owned 72% of MTN Holdings. And by 2002, M-Cell had broken out of Multichoice and listed itself on the JSE. It had also taken the name of its biggest holding, and became MTN Group.

So, it looks like Naspers won print with its newspaper, TV with MultiChoice, and the cellular revolution with M-Cell and M-Tel.

Clearly the next frontier to win in this story is the internet, right? Well, it’s not that linear.

Naspers did build for the internet. The product was called MWeb, an internet service provider and web portal rolled into one, bundling email, messaging, games and content into a single subscription. It was South Africa's version of AOL.

The product was fine, but the math wasn't.

At the time of MWeb’s launch, only a small fraction of South Africans were online, and most of them were dialling in from offices. Naspers had built something that needed a crowd, in a country that didn't have one yet.

Most companies in that position wait. They keep spending and hope the market grows into the product.

Naspers made a different call. It shut down the portal, kept the internet service provider, and went looking for a country with enough people in it: China.

From 1997, Naspers bought stakes in Chinese newspapers and early internet portals, including VNET, maibo.com and Sportscn. When the dot-com bubble burst, most of that turned to dust.

But while the wreckage was still settling, an executive at Naspers noticed something odd. 

A free messaging app called QQ was spreading quickly across China. Its parent company, Tencent, had no revenue model and was losing money on servers every month.

But it had something Naspers had failed to get with MWeb: users. A lot of them.

So, while everyone else shied away from investing, Naspers saw opportunity.

In 2001, Naspers put $32 million in Tencent in exchange for 46.5% of it. Then it did the hardest thing in venture capital, which was nothing at all; it didn’t interfere.

Over 25 years, Tencent grew from a loss-making company into one of the biggest internet companies in the world.

They’ve since built many winning products like:

In 2025, Tencent reported roughly $105 billion in revenue.

The Naspers stake peaked at around $270 billion when Tencent's share price hit its high in 2021. The stock has since fallen by ~50%, and Naspers has sold part of its holding down, but it still owns about 23% of the company, worth north of $100 billion.

That is the return on a cheque written during a crash.

It’s often hailed as one of the best VC bets ever made, but it’s a lot more significant than that.

This bet happened long before Africa even had a mature tech scene.

It was one company that had found success locally, trying to dominate the world.

But when you dig deep enough, you’d see that South Africa’s tech scene has a good number of companies like this.

Mark Shuttleworth started Thawte as a way to issue digital certificates that proved a website was secure.

In four years, Thawte had grown into the world’s second-largest internet security company, owning 40% of the global SSL market.

In 1999, VeriSign bought Thawte for $575 million. Mark, Thawte’s founder, was 28. 

Then there’s Fundamo, a mobile payments company started in Cape Town in 2001.

The company built software that let banks and mobile network operators run mobile money services.

It powered MTN’s mobile money services in South Africa, Celpay’s mobile money in Zambia, and then jumped over to the Middle East, where it signed a contract with EasiaPay in Pakistan.

By 2011, it had 50 live deployments across 40 countries. That same year, Visa bought it for $110 million in cash.

These are big wins scored before African tech became a phenomenon. And what’s ironic is that…

Here's what's striking about these companies: there's no grand narrative anywhere in them. 

Nobody was solving Africa's problems, building for the bottom of the pyramid, or even talking about financial inclusion. They were simply trying to build good businesses and sell them for money.

There was no African specificity either. 

Thawte sold digital certificates to the world. Fundamo sold payments software into 27 countries across Africa, Asia and the Middle East. Naspers put money into China, Russia, India and Brazil.

They all chased opportunity wherever it was. Whether at home or halfway across the world.

Compare that with the default framing elsewhere across Africa, where startups are pitched as development projects with an app attached.

Maybe treating tech as business first rather than a mission is part of why they won.

Or maybe these companies were simply richer. It's worth being honest about the other explanation, because it's a reasonable one.

South Africa in 2001 had a functioning stock exchange, deep capital markets, and in Naspers, an 85-year-old company with a balance sheet large enough to lose $32 million without much pain. Most African markets had none of that.

The domestic consumer base is real too. 

So money helps, and so does infrastructure. But money alone doesn't explain Tencent.

Every serious investor on earth could see QQ in 2001. Most of them had more capital than Naspers and far better information about China. They passed anyway.

What Naspers had that they didn't was a specific and expensive memory. It had already built the right product for a market that was too small, and it knew exactly what that felt like. So when it saw a chat app drowning in users with no way to make money, it recognised the shape immediately and understood which half of that problem was actually worth solving.

That isn't capital. That's knowing where to look.

Do you think other tech ecosystems across Africa should take a page out of South Africa’s book?

Let me know here.

That’s it for this week. See you on Sunday for a breakdown on This Week in African Tech.

Cheers,

The Tech Safari Team

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