Sony preparing to acquire Kadokawa suggest reports

thesixthaxis.com:

Reuters has published a story that states Sony is looking to acquire the Japanese media conglomerate Kadokawa, which has a number of brands under its various umbrellas. Kadokawa has investments within publishing, films, and the games industry. Most notably with the games industry, Kadokawa owns a majority share of Dark Souls, Bloodborne and Elden Ring developer FromSoftware. It also owns Spike Chunsoft and Acquire.

Sony owns a 2% stake in Kadokawa already, with Tencent having approximately 7% of the company. If Sony wanted to outright buy Kadokawa it would have to buy out Tencent’s shares too, though Sony may also choose to keep Tencent has a minority partner in the business. Sony also owns a minority of shares within FromSoftware, so buying Kadokawa would transfer ownership of the Elden Ring developer to Sony, along with ownership of Spike Chunsoft and Acquire. It is not yet clear how much Sony would pay for Kadokawa, but ther reports suggest that deal could be struck within the next few weeks. If Sony does complete this acquisition not only would it boost its videogame portfolio, but it would also expand its presence in the anime and manga markets, book publishing, and also have a bigger presence in the Japanese film industry too.

Kadokawa has recently suffered some setbacks within the last couple of years. In 2022, the chairman Tsuguhiko Kadokawa was arrested on bribery charges with it being related to becoming an official sponsor for the 2020 Olympics and Paralympics. He announced he would resign on October 4th, 2022. Earlier this year, Kadokawa became the target of a ransomware attack with its websites being breached. The group behind it, Blacksuit, claimed to hold 1.5 terabytes of stolen data including personnel information and user data.

Source: Reuters