Finland’s Supercell has become Europe’s first ever “decacorn” – that’s a technology company worth $10bn – after a buyout from Chinese internet leviathan Tencent.
The deal will see Tencent and its partners secure an 84.3% stake in Supercell, best known for its Clash of Clans mobile game, paying $8.6bn (£5.78bn) for the pleasure. That values the overall company at $10.2bn, the first European technology startup to break that barrier.
While Supercell’s games are regularly at the top of download charts, its new owner is less well known in the west. Tencent is worth $207bn, and is most famous for its WeChat messaging app, a sprawling communications service which is China’s equivalent of WhatsApp, Twitter, Facebook, PayPal and the App Store all rolled in to one.
WeChat has 762 million monthly users, and many of them already play mobile games on the platform. Online games are responsible for half of Tencent’s overall revenue, and the acquisition could pay off for Supercell if it helps it break the Chinese market. Almost one tenth of global game revenue will come through Tencent’s holdings, according to market researchers Newzoo. As well as Supercell, Tencent owns Riot Games, which makes League of Legends, a Moba that is the highest-grossing PC game thanks largely to its strength in eSports.
“We want Supercell to be the world’s best place for creative people to create games,” said Supercell CEO, Ilkka Paananen. “At the same time, this new partnership offers us exciting growth opportunities in China, where we will be able to reach hundreds of millions of new gamers via Tencent’s channels.”
Supercell is already used to distant owners: until this week, it had been a part of Japanese telecoms firm SoftBank. But it remains to be seen whether or not Tencent is as hands-off as SoftBank was. “Under SoftBank we enjoyed a great deal of independence,” Paananen told the Wall Street Journal. “I’d like to think of Supercell as a group of 190 entrepreneurs rather than a company.”
Supercell broke the $10bn barrier just days after a report from tech bank GP Bullhound named it one of four companies likely to be the first to do so. That report showed that the UK has the most “unicorns” in Europe, with 18 British tech firms topping $1bn.
