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.
