Chinese Owner of Grindr to Pay $1.1 Billion to Wife in Divorce Settlement

September 15, 2016

Chinese billionaire Zhou Yahui, who owns significant shares of several tech companies including the popular gay dating app Grindr, is about to award $1.1 billion worth of company shares as a divorce settlement to his wife.

According to Bloomberg, the settlement will leave his wife Li Qiong with a 26.4% stake in Beijing Kunlun Tech Co., while Zhou will retain 34.5%. The settlement amount, equivalent to 278 million shares of his online gaming company, is considered to be one of China’s biggest divorce settlements ever.

“[This] could create the country’s most expensive divorce case,” said Shanghai Securities News (via Telegraph).

“The value of the equity transfer will reach seven billion yuan, meaning the listed companies will basically be divided in half by the couple.”

As a China’s most affluent couple under the age of 40, Zhou and Li are worth around 23 billion yuan ($3.45 billion). While details on the transferring of shares were not made public, the Chinese local media has already labeled the nature of the transfer as a form of settlement from a divorce.

Li is about to own 207.4 million shares in Beijing Kunlun, with an additional 70.5 million shares via a new acquisition in BJ Yingrui Century. A previously agreed upon lockup period, however, will keep Li’s shares on hold until January 2018.

Zhou has built his fortune by distributing Chinese online games internationally after he founded Kunlun as a web game distributor in 2008. Foreign markets covered 74% of the company’s 1.78 billion yuan ($266,648,700) in revenues last year.

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