Tencent Holdings agreed to buy a 5% stake in China’s Yonghui Superstores for about 4.22 billion yuan ($639 million), joining rival Alibaba Group Holding in teaming up with a bricks-and-mortar retailer.
Shenzhen-based Tencent is buying about 478.5 million shares from existing shareholders at 8.81 yuan apiece, Yonghui said in a filing to the Shanghai stock exchange.
The price is a 9.9% discount to Fuzhou, China-based Yonghui’s last price of 9.78 yuan, before trading was halted on Deember 8.
Yonghui, which operates supermarket franchises and has more than 580 stores in China, plans to resume trading on December 18, according to the filing.
Retail Partnerships
The tie-up between tech behemoth Tencent and Yonghui follows Alibaba’s $2.9 billion purchase of a stake in Chinese grocery retailer Sun Art Retail Group in November.
China’s biggest e-commerce company agreed last month to buy 36% of Sun Art, which operates about 400 hypermarkets under the Auchan and RT-Mart banners across the country.
Yonghui is China’s fourth-biggest hypermarket operator by market share, and already has a tech-industry investor in JD.com, according to Bloomberg Intelligence.
News by Bloomberg, edited by ESM. Click subscribe to sign up to ESM: The European Supermarket Magazine
