Spotify is unlikely to be a smash hit for Tencent — but that probably isn’t a problem
Taipei — A listing of Spotify Technology shares might not be the smash for Tencent that you’d think. Like singer, songwriter and Nobel Prize winner Bob Dylan — who never had a number one hit — Spotify may end up being a slow winner for the Chinese internet giant, rather than a Beyonce-level chart topper. Spotify’s non-IPO filing shows Tencent owns 7.5% of the music-streaming service via its Tencent Music Entertainment Group. The 13.4-million shares would be worth as much as $1.77bn if you took the highest price at which equity has traded in private transactions. That’s not bad, except that at this top-end price of $132.50, it’s a mere 5.5% higher than the amount Tencent paid to acquire 8.6-million newly issued shares back in December. Complicating the valuation, however, is the fact that the rest of Tencent’s stake came from purchasing shares from an existing holder. Technically, those 4.8-million other shares came from a two-step transaction: the original investor redeemed converti...
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