{"id":13093,"date":"2014-02-22T08:36:49","date_gmt":"2014-02-22T08:36:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/praag.org\/?p=13093"},"modified":"2014-02-22T08:36:49","modified_gmt":"2014-02-22T08:36:49","slug":"koos-bekker-to-step-down-as-ceo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/praag.org\/?p=13093","title":{"rendered":"Koos Bekker to step down as CEO"},"content":{"rendered":"<figure id=\"attachment_13094\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-13094\" style=\"width: 275px\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\"><a href=\"http:\/\/praag.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/02\/die-koos.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13094\" alt=\"The Koos\" src=\"http:\/\/praag.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/02\/die-koos.jpg\" width=\"275\" height=\"183\" \/><\/a><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-13094\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">The Koos<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">South African e-commerce and media firm Naspers Ltd said on Saturday Chief Executive Koos Bekker would step down in April after 17 years of explosive growth that transformed a small publisher into an emerging markets giant.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Bekker will be replaced by e-commerce chief Bob van Dijk, the company said in a statement. Bekker will take a year off to travel and look for new growth opportunities for the company before returning as chairman in April 2015.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Under Bekker, a soft-spoken executive hailed for a string of prescient investments, Naspers went from an Afrikaans-language publisher into a $48 billion multinational by investing in Internet companies and fast-growing markets.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Bekker&#8217;s greatest success was Naspers&#8217; investment in Tencent Holdings, which has become China&#8217;s largest Internet company and in which Naspers owns around a third.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Bekker will stay on as a board member of Tencent, Naspers said.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">&#8220;I hope to travel to places like Seoul and San Francisco, where the future is being manufactured, and see if there are new technologies we should be trying out,&#8221; Bekker said in a statement.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Van Dijk, 41, has previously headed up the German arm of eBay Inc.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Naspers has been investing heavily to become a major player in on-line classified ads globally and as well as in other e-commerce platforms.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Its other businesses include pay television across South Africa and Africa and it has operations in emerging markets from Brazil to eastern Europe.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Source: Reuters<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>South African e-commerce and media firm Naspers Ltd said on Saturday Chief Executive Koos Bekker would step down in April after 17 years of explosive growth that transformed a small publisher into an emerging markets giant. Bekker will be replaced by e-commerce chief Bob van Dijk, the company said in a statement. Bekker will take &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/praag.org\/?p=13093\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Koos Bekker to step down as CEO&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13094,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[8420,8422,4543,1030,8421],"class_list":["post-13093","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-south-africa","tag-e-commerce-chief-bob-van-dijk","tag-german-arm-of-ebay-inc","tag-koos-bekker","tag-naspers","tag-tencent-holdings"],"cc_featured_image_caption":{"caption_text":false,"source_text":false,"source_url":false},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/praag.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/02\/die-koos.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13093","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13093"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13093\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13095,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13093\/revisions\/13095"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/13094"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13093"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13093"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13093"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}