Naspers scores a luck with tencent

Naspers is looking to list in Europe for $140b. It’s stake in Chinas tencent is $134b, which it acquired in 2001 for $32million

It generated $16b in sales - with most of the income coming from tencent.

The early bird gets the worm - but the second mouse gets the cheese

It’s about timing.....

In 1999, Pets.com sought to capitalize on widespread internet access and a $23B pet supplies market by selling products directly to consumers.

They raised $50M funding - to be spent on marketing  - By the time Pets.com went public with an $82.5M IPO in February 2000, it had lost $61.8M on $5.8M in sales. 

Pets.com had 570,000 customers, with its costly marketing operation spending about $158 for every new customer .

And then the tech boom bible burst and boom - that saw them as well as Value America, Garden.com, and Mortgage.com die and liquidate! 

History would prove that its value proposition — selling pet supplies to consumers online — was ahead of its time.

The next decade saw the cost of ecommerce and digital marketing reduce dramatically, and people with access to broadband jump from 48m to 232m. 

With lower costs and a bigger market to sell to, new online pet supplies retailers emerged - and Chewy.com, for example, was acquired by PetSmart for $3.35B in 2017. It was the biggest e-commerce acquisition in history.

The lesson ....

“The early bird gets the worm - but the second mouse gets the cheese! “ 

14 stats you need to know about the Forbes 2018 Billionaire List

https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/

1.  2,153 billionaires, 
2. 55 fewer than a year ago. 
3. 994, or 46%, are poorer (relatively speaking) than they were last year. 
4. Total wealth  $8.7 trillion, down $400 billion from 2018. 
5. 11% of last year’s list members, or 247 people, dropped out of the ranks, the most since 2009 at the height of the global financial crisis.
6. 195 new billionaires joine the ranks 
7. Asia-Pacific was hardest hit, with 60 fewer 10-figure fortunes. That dip was led by China, which has 49 fewer billionaires than a year ago. 
8. Europe, the Middle East and Africa also lost ground. The Americas, driven by a resurgent Brazil, and the U.S. are the only two regions that have more billionaires than they did a year ago. 
9. There are  607 billionaires in the U.S. That includes 14 of the world’s 20 richest.
10. Jeff Bezos is again number 1 in the world, followed by Bill Gates at number 2.
11. The richest newcomer is Colin Huang, the founder of Chinese discount web retailer Pinduoduo, which went public in the U.S. in July. 
12. Other notable new entrants include Spotify’s Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon; Juul Labs' James Monsees and Adam Bowen, Kind Bar’s Daniel Lubetzky and cosmetics wunderkind Kylie Jenner, who is the world’s youngest billionaire at age 21.
13. 7 of the top 20 billionaires have come from technology  - Microsoft, Google, Oracle, Snapchat, Stripe, Tencent 
14. in 2004 there were 497  billionaires and in 2019 there were 2153 billionaires