Tencent has invested in another company. Now she has acquired 90% of the shares of the Japanese Wake Up Interactive, which owns the studio Soleil. The latter specializes in games for the Nintendo Switch. The transaction amount is ¥5 billion ($43.8 million).
Ninjala
The purchase was announced by the Bloomberg portal, citing sources familiar with the details of the transaction.
According to them, Tencent and Wake Up Interactive signed an agreement back in September, but neither side is ready to officially announce it yet.
As the portal noted, buying such a large stake in a Japanese company is a rarity for Tencent. The holding had previously invested aggressively in Japan, but preferred to make spot investments in small teams, mainly to get the rights to publish studio games on the international market. At the same time, Tencent did not report on most of the transactions.
“It is not profitable for Tencent to publicly report transactions, because it does not want to notify competitors about its strategy,” analyst Serkan Toto explained the company’s behavior.
One of Tencent’s last known deals in Japan was the purchase of a 6.86% stake in publisher Kadokawa, which owns the FromSoftware studio. It cost the company ¥30 billion ($264 million).
Note that another Chinese giant, NetEase, is no less active in the Japanese market. In October, he announced the takeover of Grasshopper Manufacture, which developed No More Heroes. Earlier it was reported that the company may hire Japanese game designer Toshihiro Nagoshi, the creator of the Yakuza series. This would allow NetEase to increase competition with Tencent in Japan.
Wake Up Interactive is an entertainment holding company that opened in 2017 in Tokyo. Among his assets are two gaming companies. Valhalla Game Studios — the authors of the game Devil’s Third — and Soleil, best known for the animated action game Ninjala. Soleil also participated in the development of Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes and Naruto to Boruto: Shinobi Striker.