FOCUS-Tencent Shifts Focus To Majority Deals Overseas Gaming...

Blue chip firms including gambling group Entain, packaging company DS Smith and telecoms behemoths BT and Vodafone are all now vulnerable to foreign corporate raiders, according to experts at broker Canaccord Genuity. 

"As a consequence, some of the business that was drawn in placed the casinos at real jeopardy of infiltration by persons whom The Star had reason to suspect were likely to have been involved in criminality," Mr Gotterson wrote.

'I will say that this case is definitely a time to remind parents that it's very important to know who your children are friends with, whether that's in the classroom, social media apps, Snapchat, TikTok and then also gaming platforms.' 

Vodafone could be attractive to a US buyer, the source added. 'Darktrace has been battered since it went public, so it would make sense, and Vodafone could happen at some point. Though Vodafone is very big and very political - it would be a US buyer coming in, if anybody did.' 

In Europe, except for its purchase of majority stake in "Clash of Clans" mobile game maker Supercell for $8.6 billion in 2016, Tencent has for years mostly cut minority deals including its purchase of 9% of British gaming firm Frontier Developments.

"We believe Tencent will continue to make reasonable investments to acquire quality gaming content and talents and deepen partnerships with top-tier studios worldwide in order to step up its investments and presence in overseas markets," said Citi analysts in a report in early September.

Five years ago, in Guillermo Del Toro's Oscar-winning The Shape Of Water, Sally Hawkins played a mute who fell in love with a kind of monster, a humanoid amphibian, more prosaically described as half-man, half-fish.

"We have in black and white some damning findings about how this company has operated, how they dealt with the regulator, and their obligations to act in the public interest clearly were not taken seriously," she told reporters on Thursday.

But just as in The Shape Of Water, the Hawkins character wants the world to know that the object of her obsession is monstrous only by misperception. Richard III, she thinks, has been dreadfully maligned, above all by William Shakespeare.

Tencent's growing focus on overseas assets and markets is in sharp contrast to its much slower dealmaking pace at home since the regulatory clampdowns intensified, and the divestment of a clutch of domestic portfolio companies.

Graham Simpson from Canaccord said that as the UK stares down 'the barrel of a recession', bidders will be looking for firms with strong cash flows, high profit margins and low debt that could 'weather the inflation and interest rates storm'.

She was deservedly nominated for an Academy Award and in The Lost King she gives another wonderful performance, again as a woman reduced, in this case by the debilitating condition ME, who again falls for a monster: King Richard III.
"The two Star casinos presently carrying on business in Queensland (Star Gold Coast and Treasury Brisbane) have been operated in a way that is inconsistent with the achievement of the objectives of the Casino Control Act," the report said.

He added: 'Private equity may struggle to raise finance. This is why we believe we will also see a potential wave of corporate mergers and acquisitions. UK valuations were very attractive even before the dramatic fall in sterling.' 

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HONG KONG, Oct 1 (Reuters) - Tencent is resetting its M&A strategy to put more focus on buying majority stakes mainly in overseas gaming companies, as the tech giant eyes global expansion to offset slowing growth at home in China, people with direct knowledge of the matter said.

The Ubisoft deal comes just after deep-pocketed Tencent in June acquired Copenhagen-based Sybo Games, the developer of hit mobile game Subway Surfer, and in August took a 16.25% stake in Japan's "Elden Ring" developer FromSoftware.

Also, with Beijing strictly restricting game approvals at home and still suspending approvals for games of foreign IPs, Pkv Poker Tencent is forced to move towards gaining control of foreign game companies and their IPs, said the four sources.

Apart from the core gaming sector, Tencent is also looking to snap up global assets, in particular in Europe, related to the so-called metaverse, said one of the sources and another source with direct knowledge of the matter.

However, it is now aggressively seeking to own majority or even controlling stakes in overseas targets, notably in gaming assets in Europe, the four people with direct knowledge of the matter told Reuters.

Tencent's new strategy indicates how China's tech titans are looking to emerge from the regulatory shadows after two years of crackdown and uncertainty that weighed on their sales at home and triggered a massive selloff in their stocks.