AMSTERDAM (Reuters) – Prosus NV, the international investment arm of South Africa’s Naspers, said on Wednesday it has appointed Ervin Tu as its chief of investments in a position newly created to oversee its M&A activity.
The role to oversee M&A operations for Prosus, which invests in technology firms around the globe, will be demanding. In the past six months, the company announced more than a dozen deals, including the $1.8 billion acquisition of Stack Overflow this month. [FWN2NK0SN]
Tu, who had previously been a managing partner at SoftBank Vision Fund, will take over in August and report to Prosus Chief Executive Officer Bob van Dijk.
Prosus is majority-owned by Naspers, and Tu will serve at both companies as they have overlapping boards.
At the Vision Fund, Tu helped lead investments in Uber and TikTok owner Bytedance, among others, Prosus said.
“I look forward to his (Tu) contributions as we accelerate growth across our consumer internet portfolio,” Van Dijk said in a statement.
Prosus’s biggest and most successful investment is its 28.9% stake in Chinese software giant Tencent, which is worth $200 billion at current prices.
“The group’s track record of investing and operating businesses is exceptional, and today, there are great opportunities to find outstanding businesses across the technology landscape,” Tu said in a statement.
Before he joined SoftBank Vision Fund, Tu had also been a managing director in the technology banking division at Goldman Sachs.
(Reporting by Toby Sterling, Editing by Sherry Jacob-Phillips)
