China’s Cheetah Mobile to acquire ad network MobPartner for $58M

Cheetah Mobile, the Beijing-based firm best known for the Android junk cleaning app Clean Master, announced today it will acquire MobPartner, a Paris-based mobile ad network. The purchase will amount to US$58 million, given out in cash and stock.

MobPartner has branch offices in Shanghai, San Francisco and London. It claims to reach more than 200 million mobile users worldwide, and says it has worked with more than 10,000 publishers across 200 countries.

“By combining MobPartner’s worldwide advertiser resources, leading mobile advertising technology, and expertise in the overseas mobile advertising market with Cheetah Mobile’s large and growing mobile audience, we will be able to provide better mobile advertising solutions around the globe,” says Cheetah CEO Fu Sheng in a canned statement. “We believe this partnership will create enhanced value for our users, advertisers and publishers, and accelerate our global mobile monetization efforts.”

This marks Cheetah Mobile’s second purchase of an ad network in one year. In June 2014, it forked out US$20 million for Hong Kong’s Zoom Interactive, a greater China-facing reseller of Google and Facebook ads.

Cheetah Mobile isn’t a name that’s known among most households outside of China, but the company hopes to change that. Its flagship app Clean Master is the world’s most-downloaded Android app of its kind. It’s achieved that ubiquity through a combination of advertising, pre-installs, and organic growth. Across its larger utilities suite – which includes an anti-virus app, a security app, and a battery-boosting app – the company claims to have more than 340 million monthly active users, 65 percent of which are outside of China.

While Cheetah’s utility apps don’t earn it any cool points, they serve a dual strategic purpose. On the one hand, they serve as valuable smartphone real-estate which can be monetized off of. They also collect treasure troves of data. By purchasing global ad networks like MobPartner, Cheetah can reach out to publishers and monetize its real estate effectively, without having to pay a middleman. It’s not unusual for firms like Facebook or Twitter to purchase ad networks for the same reason. But Cheetah and other  Chinese firms have reached equally-enviable market share by creating something boring, not sexy.

Cheetah Mobile raised US$168 million from its New York IPO in May 2014. With plenty of cash in the bank, expect more ads, more growth, and more acquisitions in the future.

See: China’s tech giants are expanding abroad with utility apps

Editing by Paul Bischoff, top image by vidyo