An investment on pay-TV in South Africa in the 1980s gave the company the money it needed to diversify and to start investing abroad.

One of the overseas investments was the stake in Tencent, which was struck under Mr. van Dijk’s predecessor, Koos Bekker. Among the most lucrative investments of all time, it echoes the Japanese conglomerate SoftBank’s success with its early investment in Alibaba, another Chinese internet giant. In some ways, the Amsterdam listing is meant to position Naspers as a European version of SoftBank, which has become one of the world’s biggest investors in technology companies.

Buoyed by its Tencent experience, Naspers began to invest elsewhere around the world, particularly in emerging markets where the cost of buying was low and the chance of another breakout gain was high.

In 2007, it invested $166 million for about a third of Mail.ru, which owns what is now Russia’s most popular social network. Naspers’ stake is now worth about $1.4 billion.

In 2012, it bought an 11 percent stake in Flipkart, the fast-growing e-commerce company, for $616 million. When Walmart bought control of Flipkart last year, Naspers sold its stake to the American retailer for $2.2 billion.

Since 2017, Naspers has participated in investment rounds of at least $100 million in eight start-ups, according to data from the research firm CB Insights. The biggest was its $1 billion investment in Swiggy, an Indian food-delivery start-up.

The company’s holdings are divided into three main areas: classified ad companies, including OLX and Letgo; payment systems and technology; and food-delivery firms like iFood of Brazil and Delivery Hero of Germany in addition to Swiggy. (Prosus also has a venture capital team, which has taken smaller stakes in start-ups focused on areas like education technology.)