Mergers and Acquisitions.South Africa

Frontiersinsight                                                                                     South Africa

Naspers, Heunis sell MXit stake

Date: 23 september                                               Industry: Information Technology
Target: MXit Lifestyle                                              Deal Type: Purchase of stake
Bidder: World of Avatar                                          Share%: 90%
Seller: Naspers, Herman Heunis                             Deal volue (USD): 60.39 M

Details:   
Media holding group Naspers [JSE:NPN] along with MXit founder Herman Heunis have sold their shareholding in the social networking service to Alan Knott-Craig Jnr's World of Avatar for an undisclosed amount.On Thursday MXit announced that World of Avatar, headed by Alan Knott-Craig Jnr, the son of the former Vodacom CEO, had signed a binding agreement to purchase 90% of MXit. The remainder would stay in a staff trust.
Knott-Craig Jnr said the deal just had one regulatory notification to meet before being finalised, and then he would take over as MXit CEO in early October.
"The deal is pretty much done. We have big plans in mind, but the first thing is to consolidate a little bit and make sure the ship is steady. Things are not going to change overnight, the idea is to grow MXit at 10% per month and to really go big into sub-Saharan Africa," he said.
Knott-Craig acknowledged that MXit was seeing increased competition from other mobile social networking services such as Whatsapp and BlackBerry Messenger, but that MXit would continue to evolve and grow.
"The main reason why we bought MXit is because it is the largest digital community in Africa. We will keep an eye on the competition and what we can learn from them," he said. Heunis said that the deal had the full support of Naspers due to a pact made between the two to sell their shareholdings together.

Companies overview:

• MXit Lifestyle (Pty) Ltd. operates an Internet community to discover and share chat rooms, games, movie clips, music, and sports. It offers Moola, a virtual currency to download music, play games, touch base with new and old friends in chat zones, get wallpapers and skins, and do shopping. The company’s services include Tradepost to buy skins, wallpapers, ringtones, and music; visit chat zones; play games; enter competitions and fill in questionnaires; and find out the latest weather, news, and sports results.
• Naspers Limited is a multinational media company with principal operations in electronic media and print media. The Company through its operating subsidiaries, joint ventures and associated companies, is engaged in the operation of pay-television and the provision of related technologies, the operation of Internet and instant messaging subscriber platforms, e-commerce platforms and the publishing, distribution and printing of magazines, newspapers and books. It has operation of Internet platforms (focusing on commerce, communities, content, communication and games).

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