Koos Bekker, who has been CEO of media and technology group Naspers since
1997, will be succeeded by Bob van Dijk, the group’s head of e-commerce, on 1
April.
According to a statement issued by Naspers, Bekker will stand down from the
group’s board for a year to allow Van Dijk the space to settle in with both
Naspers’s top management and the board.
It is further stated that Bekker intends to travel to places such as Seoul and San
Francisco to establish where the group’s next growth spurt could originate.
He will remain on the board of rapidly developing Chinese internet company
Tencent, in which Naspers, the largest media group outside the US and China
and larger than any in Europe, has an estimated one-third stake.
The outgoing CEO has had an illustrious career at Naspers since the mid-1980s
when he led the launch of terrestrial pay-television service M-Net. He was also in
charge of the team that launched MultiChoice and was instrumental in Naspers’s
reinvention as an internet company, which is now the group’s biggest segment.
According to the Naspers statement, the group had a market capitalisation of
R5.6bn when Bekker took over as CEO. Today, Naspers’s market cap is valued at
R533bn.
