Social Networking - Thursday, May 1, 2008
China's Oak Pacific To Sell Leading Stake to Softbank For $430M
This is such a big deal we can only stagger back and feel our jaws drop. Softbank will pay $430M for a 35% stake in Oak Pacific Interactive, a Chinese holding company that owns social networking sites like Xiaonei.com (which is cast as the Facebook of China). Oak Pacific also owns Mop.com, an entertainment portal, and Donews.com, an IT blogging site.
The way the deal breaks down is that Softbank paid $96M for 14% stake in Oak Pacific Interactive in early April. It has warrants to buy 40% of Oak Pacific for $288M an Softbank intends to exercise those warrants.
In addition to ownership, smug grins are breaking out amongst Oak Pacific's prior investors. It had raised $58M over two rounds from Accel Partners, DCM, General Atlantic, Legend Capital and Technology Crossover Ventures.
Softbank is an odd company. Sometimes they just seem to bungle things (they bought and sank what was once the leading tech event Comdex) but then they come up with winners like its strong ownership stake in Alibaba.
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