What we know about Naspers interim CEO, Ervin Tu

Ervin Tu has been introduced because the interim CEO of Naspers and Prosus following the resignation of Bob van Dijk, the chief government of each entities. 

On Monday, September 18, Naspers, Africa’s largest firm by market capitalisation, and its subsidiary Prosus, Europe’s largest client web firm, introduced that CEO Bob van Dijk would depart the corporate. Van Dijk had been CEO of Naspers for ten years and CEO of subsidiary Prosus for 4 years. He might be succeeded by the group’s chief funding officer, Ervin Tu. 

Tu obtained an undergraduate diploma in Bachelor of Arts in Economics from Dartmouth College in 1997 and an MBA from MIT Sloan School of Management in 2004. Following his MBA, he joined Goldman Sachs, and in 2014, he ultimately grew to become managing director within the know-how banking group, targeted on M&A offers.

Tu joined SoftBank as a managing accomplice on the SoftBank Vision Fund in 2016. There, he was a part of the workforce that led investments in Uber and Bytedance, amongst others, throughout know-how sectors, together with transportation, logistics, supply, next-gen media, and sustainability. His time at SoftBank additionally noticed him co-leading M&A and company finance for SoftBank Group International.

In June 2021, Tu joined Naspers and Prosus because the group chief funding officer primarily based in San Francisco, California. In the newly created place, Tu led investments throughout the Prosus and Naspers group, reporting to now-former CEO Bob van Dijk. 

In his function at Naspers/Prosus, Tu has most prominently overseen the group’s dealing with of its stake in Chinese know-how firm Tencent. Naspers initially purchased its Tencent stake in 2001 and at present holds, by way of Prosus, a 26% stake within the firm value $112 billion. This stake is greater than Naspers and Prosus’ whole market capitalisations. Since mid-2022, Prosus has been promoting off its Tencent stake, then 29%, to finance an open-ended share buyback program supposed to bridge the hole between its market worth and the worth of its property. 

Tu has additionally overseen the share swap deal between Naspers and Prosus. In May 2021, Naspers introduced a share swap cope with Prosus to scale back the low cost between the asset worth of the businesses and their market capitalisation. The deal, efficiently accomplished in August 2021, decreased Naspers’ stake in Prosus to 56.92% and gave Prosus an roughly 49% share in its dad or mum firm. 

In March, Tu additionally oversaw the termination of the Naspers Foundry, which was South Africa’s most outstanding enterprise capital fund. The R1.4 billion fund (~$73 million), launched in October 2019, was an early investor in among the nation’s most outstanding startups, together with Sweepsouth, Planet42, and Naked Insurance. Only half of the fund had been invested in twelve startups when it was shut down.

Regarding M&A offers at Naspers/Prosus, Tu led the workforce that accomplished the acquisition of the developer-knowledge-sharing platform Stack Overflow in June 2021. Other acquisitions offers in Tu’s time on the group embrace the net studying platform Goodhabitz additionally in June 2021, iFood and Delivery Hero in August 2022, Udemy in August 2021, and Skillsoft, a portfolio firm of Prosus’s acquisition of Codeacademy in December 2021. Under Tu, Prosus additionally divested from the Russian social media platform VK in March 2022, writing off its 27% stake following the nation’s invasion of Ukraine and promoting a stake in fintech platform PayU to Rapyd for $610 million.

As the brand new CEO of Naspers, Tu’s function will embody persevering with the group’s strategic objectives, which stay unchanged regardless of the abrupt change in administration. This will embrace bringing the corporate’s consolidated e-commerce portfolio to profitability whereas sustaining development and main capital allocation throughout the Group.

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