Bruce Whitfield:
Well interim results today from Naspers for the six months to the end of September showing strong growth across most of its business units, most of its geographies, pay-TV continuing to steal the show, newspapers and magazines are solid but in South Africa particular the internet and the lack of access to broadband has been quite limiting.

Revenues in excess of R9-billion, just a quarter of those revenues coming from outside South Africa and Koos Bekker, the managing director of Naspers joins us on the line now and we will talk about your result in a moment Koos but by far the bigger news story or what has got tongues wagging on the market today is your decision to take a year-long sabbatical from April, 99 percent of people I am sure are very jealous, but what is the thinking behind taking a year off?

Koos Bekker:
Hi Bruce, yes indeed.

Bruce Whitfield:
What is the thinking behind it? Have you just been working for 21 years at Naspers and thinking to yourself it's about time I deserved a decent holiday?

Koos Bekker:
Bruce you know, I had a lucky break early in life. I was barely 33 when we started M-Net and since then I've been heading up the media company relentlessly, first M-Net, then MIH, now Naspers and you have to bring the bacon home and make the financial budget so it would be nice for me after that period and after 16 years of heading up a listed company not to have to do it for a year, that is definitely part of it.

But the other part is that many interesting things are happening in media and I would like to see places like Korea and Japan and California a bit closer to see what the latest developments are and talk to young people. You know often people are quite pretty bad in their last stint. If you look at precedents for business people, they slowdown, they don't dare things any more, they start believing their own pearls of wisdom so I would like to sort of refresh myself before I start the last five year stint.

Bruce Whitfield:
Because you are 54 now and you will be 55 by the time you come back from your sabbatical and it is interesting also you talk about Japan, Korea and California. What sorts of things are happening in those markets that you are finding particularly interesting that you actually want to actually immerse yourself in?

Koos Bekker:
Bruce, I think the whole media world is being turned upside down. You know these social networking developments which we are hardly conscious of in South Africa, things like YouTube and MySpace and so on are really a completely new phenomenon.

People are setting up networks that cross boundaries and the primary relationship of your life is actually on the internet with a group of people. The reason we are so far behind is simply our lack of broadband.

We as a country have wonderful, usually good infrastructure, but we lack broadband and consequently our young people miss out on these things. We have a lot of it of course in Tencent, our Chinese business; they are at the forefront of some developments.

Bruce Whitfield:
But in terms of the broadband story in South Africa, I mean finally we are going to see Neotel come into operation in January next year we are told but still we probably are light years away in terms of actually having fully fledged broadband in this economy.

Koos Bekker:
Bruce you are totally correct. You know in the year 2000 we had 50 percent of all the internet connections in Africa, on the continent, now it is below 25 percent and dropping every month. We?re just way behind in the internet, in many other respects we are far ahead. Take cellphones, we are one of the most advanced countries in the world in cellphones.

Bruce Whitfield:
And the reasons for that as well, I mean it is easy to point fingers at Telkom, easy to point fingers at regulators but is there a tangible reason as well as to why we have been allowed to get so far behind?

Koos Bekker:
It is purely and simply regulatory. The countries that are advanced are not that way because someone subsidised it, it is mostly simply a competitive market. You open up the market people flood in and I think that will happen now.

We had a couple of regulatory breakthroughs, I think the investment will now come but it is not a sideshow in the economy, it is the heart of the new economy. It means that if you have a doctor and he wants to see the latest heart operations from the MIC video library in Boston; he can't see it here but he will be able to see it in Hong Kong. So we will fall behind in many other seemingly unrelated fields too.

Bruce Whitfield:
Because we see and we look at your broadband technologies business and you had an operating loss of those businesses and the internet business back into operating profit but those are really tiny elements of what should at this stage have grown into far bigger contributors to your bottom line surely?

Koos Bekker:
Locally yes but abroad of course is racing ahead. I mean some of the stuff is very interesting, Intrigue our business based in California had this deal on with the New York Marathon that every single competitor has a chip in their one sneaker and there are four monitoring points across the New York Marathon route.

So if your pal John Smith approaches one of these points you get sent an SMS to warn you and you then switch to that particular channel and you can see him approaching the point. It is wonderful stuff and it is happening all over the world except here. Tencent is doing a lot of that in China.

Bruce Whitfield:
Extraordinary opportunities as well and I am going to be shouted at if I don't just ask you a question that came through on our SMS service this evening and the question is related to the Naspers BEE deal and concerns from this particular person, somebody called Reggie, saying had there been delays in the allocation of shares, certainly they were hugely oversubscribed in terms of the BEE deal which was announced a couple of months ago, a very successful BEE deal and you actually announced an extension yesterday.

Koos Bekker:
Yes, we are actually ahead of schedule. What we did is we allocated 15 percent in each of Media24 and Multichoice and that has been, as you have indicated, three times oversubscribed. We announced yesterday the way we will allocate which is basically everyone is treated the same, groups, individuals, everyone gets a certain amount but we then have this deal with Johnic to acquire their interest in M-Net which we will now inject into Multichoice and that gives us a chance to launch another scheme.

So we have said that for those people whose request for shares were not fully fulfilled we will allow them to take up further shares in Multichoice, another 7.5 percent and that will happen early in January. So hopefully we will end up with a 100 000 shareholders in each of Media24 and Multichoice, that is all our South African operations and then a number a bigger players in addition to that also in Multichoice as a result of the second allocation. The public response has been very good and we are grateful to people.

Bruce Whitfield:
Absolutely, but I suppose the bottom line message here as well is that this is for people who have got some money to put away for the long-term. This isn?t a fly by night idea.

Koos Bekker:
Yes, I think there is a lot of debate at the moment about immediate vesting and so on but I think the essence of shareholding is sharing risk; you have to start something together as a team see it through its troubled phase and eventually make some money. So I think if our shareholders stay with us for about five years that should be a nice horizon.

Bruce Whitfield:
Koos Bekker the managing director of Naspers, thanks very much for talking to us this evening, on the line to us from Cape Town and soon on the line to us from California, on the line to us from Seoul, on the line to us from Tokyo.

It will be fun to talk to him when he is on his world travels and we can see whether or not we can stay in touch with him as he goes around the world exploring new media opportunities, looking for technologies but the criticism of the South African regulators in terms of the lack of broadband in this country and how it is going to stifle economic growth.

We like to think of broadband as something that you need to make the internet work, excellent to get our emails work faster, we can download jokes off the internet a lot more quickly but actually there are some critical applications for which the future economy does depend. Broadband is critical, you heard from Koos Bekker, the managing director of Naspers.