Bob van Dijk succeeds Koos Bekker as CEO of Naspers

South African media giant, Naspers, has announced that Bob van Dijk, Naspers most senior ecommerce chief will be taking over as CEO of Naspers.

Koos Bekker, its current CEO, (61) will stand down from the Naspers board for a year, to allow Bob the space to settle in with both Naspers top management and the board.

Bob (41) holds an MSc Econometrics from Erasmus University Rotterdam (cum laude), plus an MBA from Insead in France (Dean’s List). Among other experience, he headed up eBay Germany, that group’s biggest market outside the US, and was COO of Schibsted’s Classifieds. He was hired in August 2013 to run the Naspers’s e-commerce operations in Central and Eastern Europe. He lives in the Netherlands with his wife and two daughters, according to the statement.

“In view of our strong development focus on ecommerce, the board believes that Bob has the skills to lead us into the next phase of our growth,” said Ton Vosloo, Naspers chair.

Bob will take over as from 1 April, 2014.

In April 2015, Ton Vosloo, the current chair intends to step down while Koos will succeed him.

In his one year absence from Naspers, Koos intends to travel widely and research where the group’s next spurt of growth may come from, once ecommerce has reached maturity. Koos will also however stay on the Tencent board.

Koos Bekker has been responsible for moving the company to its current height. He was part of the team that launched M-Net, one of the first such pay-television services outside the US, in 1985. Today this group operates pay TV across 48 countries in Africa and serves some 7 million households

In 1991, Naspers’ pay-TV vehicle, MultiChoice team under Koos, together with partners, launched the mobile phone operator MTN. Today MTN is the biggest mobile operator in Africa and one of the largest companies on the JSE.

Around 2008 the group entered ecommerce. It is investing heavily in an ambitious effort to become a global player in classifieds and transactional ecommerce.

When Koos moved into Naspers as CEO in 1997, the then listed group had a market cap of R5,6 billion. Today Naspers’ market capitalisation is R500 billion (US$45 billion). It is the largest media group outside the US and China, larger than any in Europe.

“We are also proud of the resonance our growth has in the South African economy, via the thousands of people we employ directly and the tens of thousands in the broader ecosystems of our businesses. We particularly enjoyed the new products and services our people invented, said Ton Vosloo.”

Koos expressed his gratitude to his Naspers colleagues and board members for the opportunity to work with them. “It’s been fun,” he said. “I couldn’t have wished for a more interesting life. Now 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. Plus experience a few oddball spots. When Ton steps down, I’ll rejoin the board, hopefully with fresh ideas.”