South Africa's Naspers Invests $500 Million in LetGo
South Africa's Naspers which continues its exploration for another Tencent and Flipkart has invested $500 million in LetGo, an app-based marketplace. LetGo is a free, person-to-person mobile classifieds app, which launched in 2015, allowing users to buy from, sell to and chat with others locally.
LetGo, the app-based marketplace for people to sell each other second-hand goods, has nabbed a great deal of its own. Today, the startup announced that it has picked up an extra $500 million in funding from Naspers, the South African e-commerce and media giant, which it plans to use to double down on growth, both in its core second-hand goods sales as well as in newer areas such as the housing listings that it launched last month.
The company has competitors as eBay, Craigslist, and Facebook, focussing on locally-tailored marketplaces.
For all the calls about supporting home startups, investors have to look for value. Just think about it: $500M leaving from a continent which has no funding to U.S. which has forests of dollars. But you cannot accuse Naspers for not trying: its internet investments have not worked out well in Africa.
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This investment is coming from OLX funds. OLX which gave up in Nigeria has better things to do with its money. We need to be ready to expect great moments to come.
Value and profitability are largely the drivers in business investments, as long as it's not charity funds or government handouts. Real business decision isn't a wealth redistribution exercise, therefore new fund can continue to journey in a particular direction; as long as those who went before it are 'testifying' the goodness of the location.
This is how it works, if you want to attract large funds, first you need to make your house very habitable for those funds. And in our case, two things are key: business environment and decent purchasing power from the habitats.
What Naspers did with its $500M largesse does not call for gloomy face or anger, but rather a re-examination with regard to why certain things don't work/happen here, and then see how to make them happen.