Say there is a large [activist] investor ->
who owns 5% of Naspers ->
which has a sizeable stake in Prosus ->
which has a sizeable stake in Tencent ->
which has a sizeable stake in Epic Games (40%+)
OR
a majority stake in Tencent Music ->
which has a respectable stake in Spotify (7.5%). Not to mention Tencent’s own stake in Spotify (1-3%)
Does it represent a conflict of interest?
There is some hand wringing with all the gaming companies Tencent owns or has a stake in. They own Supercell which was worth $10B+ before. League of Legends parent Riot. A stake in Kakao Daum that does gaming stuff too.
On top of the 40% of Fortnite parent Epic Games, they own 10 or 15% of PUBG parent Bluehole. They own 5%+ stakes in Ubisoft and Activision Blizzard (which owns Candy Crush parent King Games). They are a huge game publisher in China and okay in rest of Asia. So they get to publish a lot of games like WoW in China.
They own a handful of smaller studios and a stake in probably a dozen other gaming studios at minimum. Usually when I say studios I mean outside China too. Miniclip and Agar.io might be familiar to people. 20% of Glu Mobile too which makes a lot of the branded kitsch apps for Kardashians etc. they just got bought so not sure if ownership remains.
Tencent is the closest successor to Berkshire Hathaway. Their other minority stakes are wild too. Minority stakes each worth billions include JD.com(Amazon of China), Kakao Daum as mentioned, Snap[chat], Tesla, Pinduoduo (China’s top 5 richest is founder of this Chinese ecommerce phenom), previously or maybe still Flipkart, one of the big 3 Ecom in India, Didi, the Uber of China of which Uber merged and has a minority stake, Nio (China’s biggest electric car company for now), Meituan Dianping stake which itself could eclipse a $100B market cap, Vipshop another Chinese company. Don’t forget 5% of Reddit though that’s not worth even half a billion
And what would those be? I'm curious