Tencent Holdings Ltd. and its partners are spending $8.57 billion for a majority stake in Clash of Clans to game maker Supercell Oy. This is a move to the company expansion on some of the industry's most popular mobile titles through potentially its largest-ever overseas deal.
Tencent is China's largest web company exercising dominance over a group and is buying 84.3 percent of Supercell, including 73 percent shares of another Internet giant held by Japan's SoftBank Group Corp. along with the current and former employees. The deal values the Finland-based gaming house Supercell at about $10.2 billion. Clash of Clans and Hay Day dominate the Chinese social media scene which the deal values contain a Tencent portfolio which however made few waves abroad, Moneyweb reports.
Tencent is little known in the West, but the company's market value is about $207 billion, one of the largest Internet, social networking and online entertainment providers . It currently has hundreds of millions of users on its WeChat and QQ messaging networks; also on customers of its MyApp store. The data is based on Tuesday's closing price, more than that of Oracle Corp. and Intel Corp. Already the world's largest video game company by revenue, Peter Warman, CEO of research firm Newzoo agrees that Tencent is now truly a global company, as per USA Today.
Supercell was founded in 2010 in Helsinki, Finland. More than 100 million daily play its top four freemium games: Boom Beach, Hay Day, Clash of Clans, and Clash Royale, and have been very successful mobile gaming industry.
Clash of Clans was launched on iOS devices in 2012 and Android in 2013 and became the top game on both mobile platforms. The game is a freemium MMO (massively multiplayer online game) in which players in their own combat strategy, would build strongholds, defend their clan and join other clans to attack others.
