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Prosus is a global investment company that owns big stakes in internet businesses, most importantly a large slice of Tencent, the Chinese tech giant behind WeChat.
Prosus is best understood as a giant holding company — a firm that doesn't really sell products to you directly, but owns pieces of other companies that do. Its crown jewel is a roughly quarter stake in Tencent, the Chinese internet conglomerate whose WeChat app is used by over a billion people for messaging, payments, and more. That single investment has generated most of Prosus's value over the years, and the dividends and occasional share sales from it fund much of what the company does elsewhere.
Beyond Tencent, Prosus owns and operates a collection of online businesses across food delivery, classified ads, payments and fintech, and education technology. You'd recognize some of the names: iFood in Brazil, Swiggy in India, and a stack of online marketplace and classifieds platforms in Europe and Latin America. Many of these are growing fast but burn cash while they scale, so the Tencent cash flow effectively subsidizes the newer bets. The company also holds a big stake in Delivery Hero, the European food-delivery group. The business model has a simple logic and a built-in tension. Prosus is headquartered in Amsterdam and was spun out of Naspers, the South African media company that made one of the greatest venture bets in history when it invested in Tencent back in 2001. The problem is that Prosus trades at a discount to the value of its Tencent stake alone — investors effectively get the rest of the portfolio for less than nothing. Management has tried to close that gap by buying back its own shares, funded partly by trimming the Tencent holding. Prosus is best watched as a bet on two things: the enduring value of Tencent and the question of whether its younger internet businesses can eventually turn a profit rather than just consume capital. It is a sprawling, complicated company, and the honest summary is that its fortunes still rise and fall with one Chinese investment made nearly a quarter-century ago.
Saved answer · last researched 22 Oct 2026
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