Securities Giant SBI Snaps up Controlling Stake in One of its Crypto Rivals, BITPoint

 

The Japanese securities and banking giant SBI Holdings has made another key M&A move – and will snap up a controlling interest in BITPoint, one of the domestic rivals to its SBI VC Trade crypto trading platform.

Per Nikkei, BITPoint’s operator, the loyalty point provider Remixpoint, has stated that it will “form a capital and business alliance” with SBI in an attempt to “expand” its business through crypto “collaboration.”

This deal will involve SBI buying a 5% stake in Remixpoint and a controlling 51% stake of 65,484 shares for a sum of USD 98.6m. This will grant SBI “more than half of the total voting rights” at BITPoint. The report stated that BITPoint’s market value was estimated at over USD 193m. It noted that the deal also involves an earnout clause – a provision that would entitle Remixpoint to receive future compensation if BITPoint meets a number of financial goals.

SBI is one of four big-business players (the other three being the chat app operator Line, the e-commerce heavyweight Rakuten, and the Monex Group – another securities giant) in a business sector traditionally dominated by smaller startups.

However, stricter regulation has put many of the companies out of business, while others have been swallowed up by their rivals. Others still suffered security breaches that allowed larger companies to bail them out – on the provision that the operators sold controlling stakes to them.

SBI is yet to indicate whether it will later seek to merge BITPoint’s platform with its own SBI VC Trade operations. However, initially, it seems that in the short term at least, SBI will seek to operate the two platforms as separate entities – and says that it will seek to boost BITPoint’s liquidity via its own liquidity-providing subsidiary, B2C2. SBI snapped up the latter – a British firm – in a 2020 deal.

This is not SBI’s first major move in the M&A market – it has previously bought (and subsequently integrated) the TaoTao crypto trading platform from Yahoo Japan.

Remixpoint is also involved in the electrical power business and the two firms said they would also seek to jointly develop renewable energy power sources. SBI is not currently active in the energy sector, but does operate a crypto mining subsidiary.
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