70 years on

On Nov 11, 1998, Tencent was founded in Shenzhen, Guangdong province. After 20 years of development, it has become a Chinese social media and entertainment giant.

It operates the hugely popular social media platform WeChat and the hit games Arena of Valor and Honor of Kings.

It is also the first Asian tech company to join the exclusive club of tech companies worth more than $500 billion.

Tencent’s success dates to the country’s dramatic internet boom in the 1990s, when the population of internet users surged. Its first product was OICQ messenger, later renamed QQ.

In the 2000s, China’s internet went through a transformation from desktop to mobile. To keep up with the trend, Tencent developed WeChat, an instant messaging app for mobile devices that now has more than 1.1 billion users.

In 2004, Tencent Holdings went public on the main board of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.

Honor of Kings was the first Chinese mobile game to reach more than 10 million daily active users outside China.

Tencent also owns Riot Games in California and Finland’s Supercell. It has a major stake in Activision Blizzard.

Meanwhile, the internet giant continues to find ways to grow internationally, acquiring a 12 percent stake in Snap, the parent company of Snapchat.

Last year, it bought a 5 percent stake in Tesla, an electric carmaker in the United States. The same year, the group listed its music-streaming subsidiary, Tencent Music, on the New York Stock Exchange.

Pony Ma Huateng, chief executive of Tencent, has been named the second-wealthiest man in China, with a net worth of $36 billion, according to the latest Forbes China’s Richest 2019. The richest man in China is Jack Ma, $38.2 billion.