Tencent and Alibaba want to acquire a controlling stake in Supercell

The fact that SoftBank is considering selling 73% of the Clash of Clans developer studio was first widely known a week ago. But it turns out that there have been conversations about this before,” The Wall Street Journal reports.

Last fall, Giant Interactive Group and Alibaba Group Holding talked together about buying a stake with SoftBank and Supercell. Then the negotiations stalled because of the price, despite the fact that SoftBank is the largest independent shareholder of Alibaba, and the founder of Alibaba sits on the board of directors of SoftBank.

Now another Chinese colossus, Tencent, is ready to buy a stake in the company. According to a source in The Wall Street Journal, representatives of the company recently traveled to Helsinki, where they tried to persuade the founders of Supercell, who can veto the deal, to support the purchase.

Finns are currently more interested in continuing to work with SoftBank, since it allows them to function autonomously. Under the heel of Tencent, the situation may change a lot, although this has not been noticed for the Chinese company before.

Recall that Tencent owns 100% of Riot Games, 21.5% of Glu Mobile, 48.4% of Epic Games, 12% of Activision Blizzard, 20% of Pocket Gems, as well as a larger stake in Miniclip. As far as we know, the Chinese do not interfere in their activities.

Unlike Supercell, its Japanese owner SoftBank is interested in the deal. Its debt currently stands at $80 billion, for most of which it is worth thanking Sprint’s troubled asset (it is one of the four largest American operators).

If the deal does take place, and this is still a big question, it may well become the main one for the year. Supercell is valued by SoftBank at $5 billion. Three years ago, a Japanese company acquired a controlling stake in the authors of Clash of Clans from the studio’s valuation of $3 billion.

Sources: The Wall Street Journal, Games Industry