Alibaba sells Lingxi Games to Trustar Capital for more than $1.5B

Alibaba has divested its entire stake in mobile games developer Lingxi Games to Hong Kong-based private equity firm Trustar Capital. An internal staff memo from Lingxi CEO Zhou Bingshu, dated August 17, 2026, confirmed a 100% transfer of Alibaba's ownership, with Trustar confirming the deal the same day.

The transaction price has been reported at more than $1.5 billion by Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal. Reuters, citing a separate source, reported that Alibaba would collect more than $2 billion from the sale, describing this as proceeds rather than a stated valuation. Chinese outlets including the 21st Century Business Herald put the figure at above $1.5 billion (10.1 billion yuan).

Lingxi Games is a Guangzhou studio that Alibaba built over a decade, tracing back to its 2014 acquisition of UCWeb and its 2017 acquisition of Guangzhou Jianyue. The studio operates five internal game studios and the 9game and Jiaoyimao distribution platforms, employing roughly 1,200 staff. Its flagship title, the strategy game Three Kingdoms Tactics, developed under license from Koei Tecmo and live since 2019, has surpassed 100 million registered users.

Lingxi's revenue portfolio skews heavily toward licensed intellectual property, which represents roughly 85% of tracked billings over the past 12 months through July 2026. Koei Tecmo's five titles account for approximately 71% of revenue, led by Three Kingdoms Tactics and Nobunaga's Ambition: Shinsen. IMC Games' Tree of Savior: Neverland makes up most of the remaining 14%.

When the sale process opened in June 2026, Alibaba approached five potential buyers with a bundled ask of approximately $1.0 billion to $1.3 billion (7 billion to 9 billion yuan) for the whole Lingxi portfolio. National Business Daily reported that the final valuation was pushed from the initial market expectation of 7 billion to 9 billion yuan up to above 10 billion yuan.

Trustar Capital is the private equity arm of Hong Kong-based CITIC Capital Holdings, previously known as CITIC Capital Partners. Trustar manages $10.5 billion of committed capital and has pursued a control-buyout strategy across China, Japan, the US, and Europe since 2002. This represents Trustar's first disclosed control position in the games sector, though CITIC has backed game companies including Supercell in the past.

For Alibaba, Lingxi represents the third non-core divestiture in under two years. The group sold almost all of Intime's department store business in December 2024 for approximately $1.0 billion and sold its controlling stake in Sun Art Retail in January 2025 for approximately $1.5 billion to $1.7 billion. Reuters frames the pattern as capital being redirected toward artificial intelligence and cloud services, with Alibaba targeting more than $100 billion in annual cloud and AI revenue from external customers within five years.