Naspers' big bet on the internet and e-commerce has again served up meaty numbers, with sales growth in the two divisions rising more than 36% for the year ended March, helping feed into a 30% lift in core headline earnings to R11.2-billion. But spending has swollen too, and the market is still waiting for the emergence of a new money-spinner in the mould of China's Tencent, of which Naspers holds a 34% share. Business Times asked CEO Bob van Dijk ...For how long is development spend in the e-commerce business likely to remain as high as it is? That did contribute to a trading loss of R6.1-billion in the year.We don't give specific guidance on development spend. We typically evaluate our investments on a per-investment basis: so if we think the return on investment is going to be great, we make the investment. We've done investments in DTT [digital terrestrial television] and classifieds that are very significant and, based on what we saw, we decided to go bigger and build a larger footprint. That has led to a good deal of our development spend growth in the last few years.We wouldn't spend if we didn't really believe that it's going to make great money in the longer term. There's risk to it, of course, but the idea that it's a goal for development spend to go down, I think is flawed.story_article_left1Could you explain what you're spending money on?Sure. It's engineers that we're hiring in our e-commerce businesses, and the other significant chunk is around marketing.In our TV business, in DTT in particular, we also had fairly significant capital expenditure because you have to put sites on the ground in 160 places. That's significant hardware that has to be installed. In DTT, you have base stations. In a large country like Nigeria there are tens of base stations around the bigger population areas ... they take satellite input and distribute it to local small dishes that can pick [it] up. It needs to have its own power generation, security, and so on.Some were quite surprised at the performance of the video entertainment business [formerly pay-TV], a 17% rise in revenue for the year. Is this business still likely to see growth in the face of mounting competition from Netflix, Google and Amazon?We've always had significant competition in our TV business. Two things are sure: one is that the competition from global players is going to increase, and that the local and regional competition is not going away.On the other hand, if you look at video consumption in the world, it's actually going up quite meaningfully. So it is a real growth business but it's probably going to change quite fundamentally in the next two years and we have to also change to stay ahead and give customers new video experiences that they want.There's a huge shift from desktop to mobile, as to how people access the internet, and you've said one's app store is key to success for an e-commerce business. Naspers ranks in the top five with most of its e-commerce apps - does it cost a lot of money to stay there?When you have a new application or a new e-commerce product, you certainly have to spend marketing money to get it prominent . But quite a few of our apps have become really popular with customers, and it tends to be a very significant amount of organic download activity as long as customers like what you do. You can't market yourself into the top three in an app store.Many would-be investors are fearful that Naspers is just a one-trick pony - that it's all Tencent. Given your recent results, would you say that you have a few ponies in the stable?Tencent is a fantastic business - we're very fortunate that the team at the time had the foresight to invest in and stick with them. A lot of the investments that we're making now, although they're of a very different size, are businesses that can be very successful over time.Whether anything will be as successful as Tencent, who knows? But I think what we're doing in OLX, or in Ibibo [an online travel business in India] - they have a lot of promise, being in markets that are significant in size and have good runway.story_article_right2How worried are you about the Chinese stock market? Its rise has been meteoric, and its falls quite precipitous. Or do you ignore it?I wouldn't say I ignore it: we're certainly quite aware of it. One of the more important things for us is to focus our energies on the things we can influence for the better ... Hong Kong has been more stable and Tencent is listed in Hong Kong. I think the impact on Tencent of the Chinese roller coaster will be there, but it will be mitigated for Hong Kong-listed stock.It may become problematic for Naspers if you ever use your paper to make acquisitions, given that Naspers's share moves are so linked to Tencent. Do you see a case where Naspers will have to use its stock? Or would you rather use cash and debt?We have actually a good chunk of firepower available to us and that makes us quite comfortable that we can do what we want to do. I wouldn't exclude anything in the future but at this point we're quite comfortable with the cash we have on hand.People are also worried about the Chinese economy - are you concerned?China is now growing at around 7%, [which] is a very respectable number that most countries would only dream about. Chinese internet penetration is still below the 50% mark, so there's real upside and Tencent's success is more related to growth in online consumption than the overall economy.What's it like having Koos Bekker back in the office as chairman, after his year's sabbatical?It's excellent to have Koos back. Koos was one of the people who very much attracted me to Naspers and I think he's done a stellar job as CEO. He's now in a very different role but still I would say a great force for our company and I enjoy working with him.Are you allowed to be Bob? It's quite hard for a CEO to step back and take on the chairmanship role ...I think one of the many strengths of Koos is that he's very deliberate and conscious about how a business is run and what the different roles are.And he also deliberately stepped away from the company to give me room to establish myself and I think it made a transition for him to chairman easier by being out for a while.I think the roles are very clear and it's working very well so far.Talevi is a BDTV presenter..