Tencent Pays $10.2 Billion For Majority Stake In Supercell

Tencent announced today that it will be paying "an equity value of approximately USD 10.2 billion" to acquire "up to 84% of Supercell," creators of Clash of Clans and Clash Royale, from SoftBank. "A definitive agreement" has been signed and the transaction is "currently expected to close during the third calendar quarter of 2016." Once the transaction has closed, SoftBank will "no longer own any shares in Supercell."

Supercell CEO Ilkka Paananen wrote about the transaction in a blog post on the Supercell website. In it, he states the following.

For us, today is all about chasing a future for Supercell that we have always dreamed of. We founded this company to make great games that people all over the world would play for decades. We have been very lucky as over the past six years we've released four top games that are now played by over 100 million people every single day [...]. But more than this, we dream of our current and future games becoming a part of the rich history of games, living onto the very long term. And if you take this very long-term view, you quickly realize that we are still at the beginning of what will hopefully be a very long journey.