Naspers, the South Africa media and internet services company that is an active corporate venture investor, has admitted that a change in strategy for two of its portfolio companies, incuding Jakarta e-commerce site, Multiply, seriously affected the start-ups performance and resulted in Naspers shutting the company’s operations down. Founded in 2004, Multiply started out as a social networking and media sharing service in Florida and at its peak reached 11 million registered users.
“The performance of Multiply has been below expectation since its repositioning from a social networking service to online marketplace and we did not believe the situation would improve,” a Naspers spokesperson told online news site, BusinessTech.
“As a result we closed the business on 31 May, after allowing reasonable time for the merchants on the Multiply platform to find and migrate to alternative ecommerce platforms,” the spokesperson said.
The group also reported in its annual results that it closed its e-commerce site, Sabuy, in Thailand. According to a Business Tech report, Myriad International Holdings (MIH), a subsidiary of Naspers, bought a controlling interest in Sabuy in 2010, and in 2012 it moved to Jakarta, Indonesia, focusing on e-commerce and dropping its social networking aspects.
Naspers might have got its hands burnt by some of its investments in Asia, but it still sees itself having a successful future there in the corporate venturing arena. A spokesperson said, “We retain exposure to the region (Indonesian and Philippine) through investments in Tokobagus (Indonesia) and Sulit (Philippines), both strong brands occupying the number one market position in the general classifieds category in each of the two respective countries.”
Shares in Naspers have jumped 76.77% over the past year (August 2012 – August 2013). But it has not all been smooth sailing. China internet company, Tencent Holdings, which is also an active corporate venture investor and 30 per cent owned by Naspers, did not meet analyst estimates late this summer.
This has yet to materiaise any changes to Naspers’ investment strategy in Asia.