Kuaishou Acquires AcFun for Possible Valuation of $162 Million

Kuaishou, one of China’s most popular video apps, confirmed on Tuesday that it has completed the purchase of AcFun to fully own China’s largest online video hosting platform.

Kuaishou will support AcFun in the provision of funding, resources, and technology while AcFun remains independent in its own brand, operation, staffing and development planning.

The details of the deal has not been disclosed, however, according to the announcement by ChineseAll Digital Publishing Group Co. at Tuesday noon, the listed company has sold their 13.51% stake in AcFun to Kuaishou for a price of 140 million yuan ($23 million). This puts AcFun at an evaluation of 1.04 billion yuan.

When ChineseAll Digital acquired their shares in AcFun at the end of 2016, the value of AcFun was estimated to be 1.85 billion yuan. Now it has shrunk by nearly a half.

AcFun’s operating income in 2015 was 3.63 million yuan, with a net loss of 113 million yuan. The company had revenue of about 710,000 yuan in the first nine months of 2016, with a significant net loss of 1.46 billion yuan.

In addition to the pressure of performance, the ACG (animation, comic and game) video sharing platform also experienced several internal executive replacement. In 2010, the founder sold AcFun and rounds of management changes ensued the investment from Youku Tudou Inc. (now Youku Inc.) in 2015 and investment from Softbank China in January 2016.

The current CEO Liu Yanyan, also the former chief editor of AcFun, took over in July 2016.

This February, the AcFun website as well as its Android and iOS apps suffered a shutdown by its domain registrar Alibaba Cloud due to failure to renew the domain name and possible financial constraints. Access to the website and apps was restored as of February 12, ten days after the shutdown.