Tencent Music has announced a deal to acquire podcast platform Ximalaya. Photo Credit: TME
Turns out there was something to Tencent Music’s rumored Ximalaya acquisition plans: The music streaming giant has officially announced a deal to purchase the podcast platform.
Tencent Music (NYSE: TME) confirmed the proposed buyout in a regulatory disclosure today, following late-April rumblings of its “advanced” talks with Ximalaya. The latter hosts not just the mentioned podcasts, but audiobooks, lessons, and all manner of radio stations, to name a portion of the many offerings at hand.
And evidently, these multifaceted offerings – covering everything from children’s entertainment to local news and relaxation audio to novels – have caught on. Hosting both free content and subscribers-only media, Ximalaya reportedly boasted north of 300 million monthly active users as of 2023.
Meanwhile, an English-language international app called Himalaya, described as the “brainchild of Ximalaya,” looks to have over one million Play Store downloads.
On the opposite end of today’s transaction, there’s presumably a significant integration upside for Tencent Music, which reported having 555 million MAUs across its streaming services in Q1 2025.
Bearing all that in mind, Tencent Music is putting up a combination of cash ($1.26 billion) and stock to purchase Ximalaya, the aforesaid disclosure shows.
Stock-wise, that refers mainly to ordinary shares “not exceeding 5.1986% of” Tencent Music’s total issued shares. (Stateside, TME’s market cap was $29.3 billion at the time of this writing.) Another 0.37% of total shares will “be issued to the founder shareholders,” the buyer summed up.
Finally, regarding top-level terms, “Ximalaya will undertake a restructuring of certain existing businesses in connection with the Transaction,” according to the text. Time will, of course, tell exactly what that entails; the deal is also subject to regulatory approval.
But among the stakeholders benefiting from the sale is Sony Music, which, per different regulatory disclosures yet, spent $50 million on 4.61 million Ximalaya shares back in 2020, we previously noted.
And for Tencent Music itself – which operates streaming services QQ, Kuwo, and Kugou, besides a distinct WeSing karaoke app – it’s safe to say that the acquisition will bolster its already-dominant position over domestic competitors like NetEase Cloud Music.
(Despite Tencent Music’s market-share edge, Cloud Music is likewise reporting growth and solid revenue – to the tune of over $1 billion during 2024. Sony Music has a sizable stake in Cloud Music as well.)
More broadly, while it’s best to wait out for consumption particulars before drawing conclusions, the Ximalaya acquisition could represent a stiff competitive jab to Spotify and other diversified audio platforms. Domestically, that includes Apple Music, which only brought its standalone Classical app to the Chinese mainland last year.
Content shared from www.digitalmusicnews.com.