Prosus CEO Bloisi has R371bn, is ready to spend in Europe

Prosus chief executive officer Fabricio Bloisi said the technology investor has close to $20 billion (R371 billion) to spend and is ready to grow in Europe.

Bloisi runs both Amsterdam-based Prosus and Naspers, its South African parent, and the companies already hold significant stakes in European companies including Germany’s Delivery Hero SE. Still, most of its deals in recent months have been in historically higher-growth markets, such as an initial public offering in India and a $1.7 billion deal for a travel agency in Brazil.

“We need to invest substantially more here to put Europe in this race and not to keep looking for an outsider,” Bloisi said in a Bloomberg TV in an interview at the World Economic Forum on Thursday. “Our ecosystem in Europe is ready to grow, and we are ready to invest.”

Read: Prosus chair’s trust sells R2.97bn shares for hotel growth

Bloisi was promoted to the CEO role last year and has been charged with finding new sources of growth after an early investment in Chinese video game behemoth Tencent Holdings ended up dominating the company’s books and skewing its market value. He said Prosus is ready to invest closer to home and called President Donald Trump’s moves to make the US a superpower in artificial intelligence a “wake-up call” for Europe.

Naspers and Prosus share price 

“In Davos last year, the big thing was, ‘How we can avoid moving too fast on AI?’,” he said. “The Trump administration has moved the narrative to, ‘We are going to move faster than anyone else.”’

Trump this week rescinded President Joe Biden’s AI safety measures and announced a $500 billion AI infrastructure joint venture led by SoftBank Group Corp, OpenAI and Oracle Corp.

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Prosus is also interested in seeking partners in the infrastructure around European AI, Bloisi said.

Prosus, through Naspers, made a blockbuster investment in Chinese game-maker Tencent in 2001, when it paid $34 million for a 50% stake. Today, it owns about a quarter of the company, which has a total market value of about $450 billion.

“Prosus’s play is not China,” Bloisi said. “Prosus’s play is a shareholder of a Chinese company. But where we invest and where we want to grow is in Europe, India, Latin America, Africa, and that’s where we are investing.”

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