Financiator schreef op 22 februari 2022 18:31:
Hier een antwoord van Prosus om mijn zorgen over het creeren van aandeelhouderswarden van enkele dagen geleden:
Hi Peter,
Thank you for your email. We share your frustration with the share price falling over the past year. We believe the decline has been caused by several factors combining, most of which has been largely out of our control.
First, Covid had a significant impact on many of our businesses, and in most cases we have seen performance normalize as we adapted well to the implications of the pandemic.
Second, the value of our largest investment, Tencent, has fallen from a peak of HK$750 to below HK$450 mainly due to investor concerns on the impact of a broad range of new regulations introduced by the Chinese regulators. We believe Tencent is adapting well and are confident it will reaccelerate growth over the coming years, from which we will benefit.
Third, after many years, the interest rate cycle has turned in the US and Europe. This has led to very significant shift in sector allocation (rotation) by fund managers away from growth (and especially earlier stage) companies. We have seen many of our peers in Classifieds, Food delivery, Fintech and Edtech fall over 50% in value recently. We have seen these cycles many times before and, while very painful at the time, we expect the attractions of growth companies to reassert over time and return to favour, which once again will benefit us and drive shareholder value over the long-term.
Fourth, we own many companies in emerging markets and there are ongoing geopolitical events that have impacted confidence in markets like Russia where we have been active for many years. Again, we have seen these cycles many times and are well diversified.
In short, we faced very significant headwinds over the last year, but we remain confident in our ability to emerge stronger over coming years. We have built a portfolio of strong, attractive businesses with significant potential for growth and profitability over the long-term. We are well capitalized with over $10bn of gross cash to deploy and we have a clear strategy to deliver attractive returns for shareholders over coming years.
Regards,
Prosus IR