Bob van Dijk of Prosus on the Future of Technology

The pandemic lockdowns changed consumer behavior, forcing Prosus to adapt in ways that Mr. van Dijk believes will be permanent. “We don’t have any reason to believe they will go away,” he said, adding that the pandemic essentially “brought the future forward by a few years.”

In short, that means greater automation and less human contact.

“In our e-commerce business, we already had drop-off lockers,” Mr. van Dijk said. “That’s become very, very prevalent. We figured that people like it. It’s no-contact delivery.”

Spurred by necessity, Prosus’ portfolio companies found other ways to wring efficiencies. “We found that more of our business can be automated than we thought,” he said. “That was pushing us further down the curve of making a very smooth customer experience that has as few touch points as possible.”

For example, its classifieds business, OLX, began asking customers to inspect the cars for sale themselves, reducing social contact.

“When forced, you can think creatively,” Mr. van Dijk said.

Food delivery, unsurprisingly, has been as strong a business for Prosus during lockdowns as it has been for Uber, DoorDash and others. But Prosus companies like Delivery Hero and iFood took steps to help preserve long-term good will with its partners at the expense of short-term profits. In Brazil, for example, “we paid restaurants much quicker than we usually did,” Mr. van Dijk said. “From a cash-flow point of view, that was actually pretty important” in keeping restaurants in their good graces, reducing potential tensions between restaurants struggling during the pandemic and online delivery apps seeing demand soar.

It was a similar story in India for classifieds. “We reduced fees substantially, or we waived fees,” he said. “That allowed people to preserve cash. When things started to come back again, there was a lot of appreciation around that.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/03/business/dealbook/prosus-technology-deals.html