China’s Tencent surpasses Facebook
Tencent Holdings has racked up some impressive gains this week – becoming the first Chinese firm to be worth more than US$500 billion (NZ$730 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 app 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 US$522b on Tuesday and easily outpacing a 36 per cent rise in the benchmark Hang Seng Index.
That beat Facebook’s market value on Monday of US$519b.
Only Apple, with a market capitalisation of about US$873b, followed by Alphabet, Microsoft and Amazon are worth more.
Led by Chinese billionaire Pony Ma, Tencent Holdings this month reported a better than expected 69 per cent increase in third-quarter net profit.
‘‘Tencent’s high growth, as demonstrated by its quarterly results, has supported the rally in its shares,’’ said Steven Leung, a sales director at UOB Kay Hian.
After Tencent, rival Alibaba ranks second among Asian firms with a market value of US$481.5b, while South Korea’s Samsung Electronics is No 3 at US$364b. –Reuters