Japan's SBI pays $270 million for a fifth of trading app Ajaib

SBI Holdings, one of Japan's large online finance groups, is paying $270 million for a 20 per cent stake in Ajaib Group, a major Indonesian online brokerage, Nikkei Asia reports. The deal could close as early as this month. Ajaib will become what accountants call an equity-method affiliate, which means SBI does not run the company but records its share of Ajaib's profit or loss in its own books. That price implies a value of roughly $1.35 billion for the whole of Ajaib.

Nikkei puts the purchase inside SBI's move into crypto and its wider expansion across Southeast Asia. The group has already backed Singapore firms working on cross-border settlement, the plumbing that moves money and shares between countries, and on securities trading. Ajaib sells stock and crypto trading through a phone app, so what SBI is buying is a piece of the habit Indonesians have built of investing from a handset.

Indonesian shares have had a rough year, which is what makes the size of the cheque interesting. A foreign group is paying a lot for a business whose value depends on Indonesians keeping money in the market, not on any single good quarter. It is one deal, not a trend, and Ajaib's users will not see anything change on the app tomorrow.

Why it matters

If you trade through Ajaib, your broker now has a deep-pocketed foreign shareholder with a stated interest in crypto, so watch for new products and for changes in fees, which is where brokers compete. For everyone else, this is a rare piece of news pointing the other way from the outflows that have dominated the market story this year. The test is whether other foreign buyers follow, or whether SBI turns out to be alone.