China’s Tencent pips Facebook in mkt value

Tencent Holdings Ltd has racked up impressive gains this week — becoming the first Chinese firm to be worth more than $500 billion and surpassing Facebook to be the world’s fifthmost valuable company.

Earnings for China’s biggest social network and gaming firm have surged on the popularity of its smartphone games led by titles such as Honour of Kings - a fantasy role-playing game, which has as many active players as the population of Germany.

Also driving earnings has been its messaging-to-payment superapp WeChat which has amassed 980 million monthly active users, with 38 billion messages sent daily, while its Youtube equivalent, Tencent Video, has become the video streaming service with the largest paying subscriber base in China.

That success has helped Tencent’s stock more than double this year, making it Asia’s most valuable company worth $522 billion on Tuesday. That beat Facebook’s market value on Monday of $519 billion.

Only Apple Inc with a market capitalisation of about $873 billion followed by Alphabet Inc, Microsoft Corp and Amazon are worth more.

Led by Chinese billionaire Pony Ma, Tencent this month reported a better-than-expected 69% rise in third-quarter profit.

After Tencent, rival Alibaba Group ranks second among Asian firms with a market value of $481.5 billion, while South Korea’s Samsung Electronics is No. 3 at $364 billion.

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