Prosus says it has a healthy deal pipeline for the next six months, with a specific focus on companies that operate marketplaces, as the consumer internet giant seeks to strengthen its ecosystem that includes payment platforms.
More investment in artificial intelligence (AI) is also on the cards, as the company wants to improve operations and deliver better products to its more than 2-billion customers across Africa, the Middle East, Europe, India and Latin America.
The Amsterdam-based group, which is an investment arm of Naspers, has shares in technology companies housed under different portfolios — online classifieds, payments and fintech, food delivery, and education.
“We are quite confident we will have good deals and investments over the next six months. Our big priority is to have many marketplaces, and these marketplaces will be focused in the regions where we have a clear competitive advantage,” said Prosus CEO Fabricio Bloisi.
“At the same time, we have in those regions many fintechs that leverage our marketplace. These fintechs enable us to do better payment transactions and also offer credit to our customers and partners.”
Prosus has marketplaces that sell a range of products, including Indian food and grocery delivery business Swiggy; Takealot, an e-commerce platform selling a wide variety of items and electronics devices; and its Romania counterpart eMag. Also in its stable is OLX, a classified business that helps people buy and sell a range of products from cars to household goods.
We are quite confident we will have good deals and investments over the next six months. Our big priority is to have many marketplaces, and these marketplaces will be focused in the regions where we have a clear competitive advantage
Bloisi said investments will be made in Europe, Latin America, the Middle East and Africa. “Europe requires more investment in terms of innovation and moving faster. We have also spent time in Africa and Latin America and these markets have lots of opportunities. We are well positioned to explore the rest of the work investment,” he said, adding that the company had about $10bn [about R180bn] for possible investments today.
“Our future growth will be driven by our AI-first mindset and disciplined investment into building world-class marketplaces, combined with greater collaboration across the ecosystem.”
Bloisi, who has been at the helm for six months, said using AI in everything the business does is critical.
“We have Toqan, our internal technology to deploy AI internally, and every day we're using AI in every area of the company — from technology, finance or legal. We believe we have about a 15% increase in productivity from pushing AI in everything we do inside the company, and this number is going to increase. Our initial focus over the last six months was to use AI to make our companies run better. We're improving our marketing campaigns through AI, we're improving our fraud prevention through AI, [and] we're delivering cheaper customer support using AI.”
He said Prosus would make AI-related Investments in South Africa and Brazil because “we want to help South Africa and Brazil to move faster in AI, and help in investment and knowledge”.
Bloisi has also been pushing for more collaboration among the Prosus companies.
“We spend a lot of time sharing best practices and knowledge ... hosting events for everyone in the company to know each other and understand what they can learn from other companies; moving people between the companies so they can teach each other what they're doing well and learn from the other companies. And the results are amazing.”
Executives at Takealot were recently part of a product- and information-sharing meeting with their counterparts from India and Latin America.
The Takealot group houses the Naspers South Africa e-commerce businesses Takealot.com and MrD.
Naspers said the business continued to face a slow-growing macroeconomic environment and increased competition from new entrants such as Temu and Amazon, affecting the Takealot group’s revenue growth and gross merchandise value (GMV) growth of 11%, excluding Superbalist, which has since been sold, for the six months to September. GMV measures the total value of goods sold
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