Africa's biggest media company, Naspers, has several opportunities on the table to make investments in China and India and expects to finalise a deal this financial year.
Chief Financial Officer Steve Pacak told Reuters on Tuesday the company was constantly in talks regarding its expansion into Asia's twin emerging market powerhouses and expected to make at least one purchase in the second half of the year.
Naspers might opt for a string of smaller purchases or launch new companies. Alternatively it could plump for one or two major acquisitions, given its cash-heavy balance sheet.
"There are some very distinct opportunities on the table. The difficulty is to ascertain which ones to go for and when," Pacak said in a telephone interview.
"We have some 3 billion rand ($463 million) on our balance sheet and the capacity to raise a lot more in debt. We have no magic number but we could easily do one or two deals of several billions of rand." Naspers earlier unveiled a 57 percent jump in headline earnings per share for the first half to end-September but said expansion in China and India in the second half would weigh on profits.
Pacak said core headline earnings - stripping out the impact of a deferred tax asset that inflated last year's headline earnings - would grow more slowly in the second half than in the first but would still keep rising. Naspers, which runs Africa's only pay-TV network DStv and publishes South Africa's biggest-selling newspaper Daily Sun, has made expansion into Asia a key plank of its growth strategy.
It already owns a 9.9 percent stake in Beijing Media Corp - making it the first foreign company to hold an interest in a Chinese media firm - and owns 36 percent of Chinese instant messaging unit Tencent.
Pacak said the company wanted to expand Tencent and also hoped to break into the Chinese print media market and, eventually, pay TV. In India, print media is the obvious place to start since that is where the opportunities lie, but Naspers will also investigate ways of gaining a foothold in pay-TV and electronic media, Pacak said. He declined further details.