South African exec Basil Sgourdos receives $4.3-million salary from Naspers in 2023

Basil Sgourdos, the accomplished South African business executive and Group CFO of Prosus and Naspers, Africa’s largest publicly listed company and the 512th largest in the world, received a total remuneration of $4.3 million, in contrast to the $10.12 million earned the previous year.

According to the recently published annual reports, the total remuneration of the South African business executive at the end of the group’s 2023 fiscal year which plummeted to $4.3 million in 2023 can be attributed to Naspers’ lacklustre financial performance at the end of its 2023 fiscal year, which concluded on March 31, 2023.

Sgourdos’ 2023 compensation package comprises a base salary of $1.2 million and a performance-based short-term incentive of $1 million derived from the bank’s exceptional performance during the fiscal year.

However, the most significant decline in Sgourdos’ remuneration package resulted from his long-term incentive awards (LTIs), which dropped to zero in 2023. In the previous year, he received a performance payment of $4.67 million.

Sgourdos has been the group CFO and financial director of Naspers since 2014; his career spans over two decades, playing diverse roles within Naspers Group since joining in 2009.

His breakthrough came when he was appointed as the group CFO of Prosus N.V. (formerly known as Myriad International Holdings B.V.) in January 2009, a position he held until his transition to the group CFO of the Naspers group on July 1, 2014.

Since assuming the mantle of group CFO, Sgourdos has led Prosus and Naspers Group to impressive financial milestones. At the end of its 2023 fiscal year Naspers’ consolidated revenue from continuing operations grew by 7.7 percent from $6.29 billion to $6.8 billion, with the biggest contributors being Food Delivery and Payments and Fintech.

The company’s annual report reveals a sharp decline in profit after tax, declining by over 46 percent from $18.54 billion in 2022 to $9.95 billion in 2023. The decline can be attributed not only to the decrease in gains from the partial disposal of equity-accounted investments, which includes the sale of its stake in Chinese multinational technology conglomerate Tencent, but also to the impact of dilution losses on equity-accounted investments.

Gains from the partial disposal of equity-accounted investments declined from $12.43 billion in 2022 to $7.62 billion in 2023. Concurrently, dilution losses on equity-accounted investments increased from $18.54 billion to $9.95 billion.