INTERNET
The internet segment grew revenues by 42% to R1,6 billion. This expansion came from a solid performance by established operations and the inclusion of the new investments in the current year.
The acquisition of 100% of Tradus concluded in March 2008. Tradus leading trading platforms in 12 offering online auction and fixed-price sales services to consumers. Its primary market is Poland, with operations in Western, Central and Eastern Europe. Over the past year registered users grew by 41% to 12 million. The gross merchandise value of goods traded on its
platform expanded by 45% to
€1,6 billion and revenues grew 78% to
€107 million. We have restructured the group into two focused businesses with the Allegro brand focused on Eastern Europe and Ricardo on the Western European markets.
In China Tencent strengthened its position with the QQ platform, attaining 317 million active registered user accounts. The QQ.com portal and wireless service portals continued to build their market position. The QQ Game portal reached four million peak simultaneous users. Tencent, which was recently included in the Hong Kong Hang Seng Index, contributed
R615 million to the group’s core headline earnings.
In Russia mail.ru is experiencing rapid growth, and almost doubled traffic to its portal. The core offering of e-mail services has been growing at a compounded rate of 59% over the past few years. mail.ru contributed R49 million
to our core headline earnings.
In December 2007 we acquired 97% of Warsaw-listed Gadu-Gadu, the leading instant-messaging platform in Poland. Over the past year the number of active instant-messaging users grew by 10% to 5,9 million. The social networking site now has 3,2 million users.
In South Africa connectivity business MWEB maintained its position as the leading internet service provider (ISP). In the rest of the sub-Saharan Africa market, AFSAT is the leading provider of networking solutions through satellite technology. Since the group owns no other ISP services anywhere else, offers of purchase for these services have been requested and are being evaluated.
24.com remains the largest internet publisher in South Africa. MXit doubled its revenue over the period, reaching more than eight million users and launched services abroad.
In India we invested R103 million to develop the greenfields social network services and local search operation ibibo. It is one of the fastest growing Indian internet sites, with
1,7 million registered users. ibibo recently concluded an agreement to partner with
Tencent in India. |
