Japan has been expressing interest in gobbling up European companies lately to expand their outreach worldwide. Rakuten buying out Spanish video streaming service Wuaki.tv a few weeks back is one example of this. Another Japanese giant is at it again with advertising company Dentsu announcing today that they acquired Aegis, an advertising giant from the United Kingdom for $5 billion. This big move by them allows them to expand their overseas presence even further since Aegis is big over at Europe. Dentsu also has some business going on over in China and some Latin American countries. President and CEO Tadashi Ishii, pictured above, hopes that this acquisition will make them the sole market leader in the Asia-Pacific region along with having strong presences at Europe and United States.

Dentsu’s prior activities in terms expanding their company worldwide range more than just advertising. They had a hand in launching cloud-based platform Dcloud and a media consultancy based at Singapore for more opportunities at the Southern Asia market. Their staff will also nearly double with the Aegis acquisition as they will have people working at 80 countries. 30% of Aegis’s stock has been in Dentsu’s possession as well as they expect to pay 2.40 per share, which Aegis’s board didn’t mind agreeing to. Dentsu has been around since 1901, but this is a big day for them spending huge amounts of money to buy out one of Europe’s biggest advertising companies.

Today’s announcement is definitely up there in multi-billion dollar acquisitions, which puts most of other blockbuster acquisitions that already happened this year to shame. To be fair though, this is one giant advertising company buying another one compared to a big social network buying out a rising startup. With Rakuten and Dentsu making big moves over in Europe, will other Japanese giants follow suit to go after the European market? I do believe so since globalization continues to become a major priority of Asian companies in general these days.