Whitney Houston’s I Wanna Dance With Somebody broke out on his mobile phone as Fabricio Bloisi was answering a question at a results round-table with journalists at Naspers headquarters in Cape Town on Monday.
The CEO designate hastily reached for the phone in its red casing, frantically trying to kill the song. Laughter broke out in the room on the 26th floor with magnificent views of Table Mountain and the harbour.
The technology and media giant has named the 47-year-old Brazilian to replace Bob van Dijk as the head of the group and its Dutch-based subsidiary Prosus.
Flanking Bloisi was Ervin Tu, who has been acting CEO since Van Dijk’s departure eight months ago, and CFO Basil Sgourdos. Tu now fills the new role of chief investment officer and group president.
The choice of Bloisi took global markets by surprise, but given Prosus’s struggles, the logic of Naspers looking to one of its entrepreneurial stars to lift performance is clear.
Prosus is reeling from some bad investments. This week it announced it had to write off its $570m (about R10bn) investment in Indian ed-tech firm Byju after a series of financial missteps and corporate governance mishaps at the company. The 9.6% stake — which made Prosus the largest investor in Byju — was at one time valued at $2.2bn.
Its Q&A platform, Stack Overflow, has been hurt by the rise of AI.
On Monday, the Naspers executives attempted to shrug off the bad news from Byju, Stack Overflow and other underperforming assets as the group reported a consolidated trading profit of $24m at its e-commerce operations in the year to end-March, from a loss of $437m the previous year.
Naspers is still a giant, delivering revenue growth of 8% to $6.4bn and a dramatic $486m reduction in trading losses from a high of $640m in 2023 to $461m. Core headline earnings — its measure of profitability after taxes — increased 88% to $2.1bn.
But if you strip out returns from its 27% stake in Chinese online gaming behemoth Tencent (including proceeds from the sale of its shares in Tencent), the picture does not looks so rosy.
The e-commerce business has star performers galore, among them the classifieds business OLX, the merchant payment platform PayU, and food delivery platforms Swiggy (India), Delivery Hero (Europe) and iFood (Brazil).
In fact, it was iFood that put Bloisi on the map. Having started Movile, also a food delivery platform, when he was just 21 in 1998, he caught the eye of Naspers. It invested in the start-up and Movile then acquired iFood in 2013.
The business has seen remarkable growth under Bloisi’s leadership, transforming it into Latin America’s premier food delivery business. iFood has expanded from a 20-strong start-up 11 years ago to 5,500 employees now and partners with 350,000 restaurants. It processes more than 96-million orders a month for 60-million customers and contributes 0.53% to the GDP of Brazil.
The Prosus CEO-designate has now relocated to Amsterdam, where he lives out of a suitcase in a hotel and in true Dutch fashion commutes by bicycle.
A fitness fanatic, he takes morning or afternoon runs almost daily. On this brief visit to Cape Town he’s been clocking 12km runs along the Sea Pint promenade. He’s also a helicopter pilot and scuba diver — his wife Cecilia and their four daughters join him in the water. A keen hiker, he’s completed the Camino de Santiago in Spain.
But righting the Naspers/Prosus ship will be an uphill slog.
It’s good to have a company that invests locally in Africa, in Latin America, in India, because we are in a moment where technology is going to become even more important.
Bloisi, from the northeastern state of Bahia, has developed a reputation for a Silicon Valley leadership style, expressed in his easy-going demeanour, semi-casual stonewashed jeans and open-necked shirt. It’s apparent in the way he interacts with staff, media, investors and other stakeholders, and in his confidence.
He articulates clearly what the problems are and how he plans to fix them.
“I think the job of the CEO is to have very good people and have a good direction. Have people that are really committed to deliver something… A dream or goal. It’s much more about making the people do their best than doing things by yourself.”
And he’s bringing to Prosus many of the ingredients that turned iFood into a unicorn.
“I think all this growth is possible because of the way we look to culture, think very big…believing that it’s possible to build much more and to grow and be an ambidextrous company, meaning that at the same time we are very much like a start-up, we have ideas, and we iterate a lot and we are creative. But at the same time, we are disciplined as a big company.”
Bloisi wants Prosus’s 30,000 employees to be more innovative and entrepreneurial because in his view the company is a bit conservative.
“My big priority is ‘communicate’. Think big, make the company be more innovative and entrepreneurial. When I say more entrepreneurial, it is not to do what Fabricio wants; it’s to empower people that are very good to say you can make the difference, but you have to think big and to make plans to have big impact, and I think the company is more conservative today than I want it to be.”
He believes the world needs a Big Tech company that is not from Silicon Valley or China, and Naspers/Prosus is poised to fill that role.
“It’s good to have a company that invests locally in Africa, in Latin America, in India, because we are in a moment where technology is going to become even more important. We have to develop the technology; we have to connect with the local needs, and I think processes are amazing for that.”
This starts with doubling down on and investing more in what the tech firm is very good at — food delivery and online classifieds. “But it must also excel in AI to remain competitive.”
Making best use of technology to innovate is not just important for Prosus, Bloisi thinks. South Africa and Brazil should emulate China and harness this tool to grow their economies, create millions of jobs and lift their people out of poverty.
“We have some big technology companies that grew a lot in China over the last few years. What I’m describing is happening in Asia right now. India has big tech companies that are growing very fast. Places like South Africa and Brazil, where I come from, have to embrace the change as a way to develop faster.”
What is his ultimate ambition as CEO? Apart from making the company more profitable, competitive and more innovative, Bloisi wants to build Prosus — which has yet to make serious inroads in North America or Western Europe — into a global tech leader that has the brand power and impact of Amazon.
“To see it as one of the biggest tech companies in the world, with billions of people using our products daily; and innovating to create the next trends.”
Although not a footballing man or fan of the game of billions so loved in his native Brazil, in Bloisi, Naspers/Prosus may have just found their own Pelé.
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