Tencent has a lot to celebrate about right now. It’s overtaken Facebook in market value and its eyeing up the first international expansion of WeChat.
The social media and gaming firm’s quarterly results last week were so good that it now has a market cap of $534.5bn. This makes it the first Asian firm to enter the exclusive club of $500bn+ firms, ahead of its major competitor, e-commerce firm Alibaba.
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It’s not long until Tencent could even overtake Amazon, which has a market cap of $542.7bn at the moment.
Read more: Which companies are on their way to becoming worth a trillion dollars?
Why is Tencent doing so well?
Social and other advertising revenue, from its WeChat platform, rose 63 percent in the third quarter of 2017. It payments and cloud services helped its other business sector rise 143 percent.
WeChat holds the key for Tencent to keep growing. It has nearly 1bn users and is going to begin rolling out to Malaysia, the first foreign expansion of WeChat.
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By GlobalDataIt recently gained an e-payment license in Malaysia for local transactions so the company is planning a launch for early 2018.
“Malaysia is actually quite large in the sense that we have 20m WeChat users, huge potential, and the market is quite warm towards internet products from China,” Tencent’s senior vice president S.Y. Lau said.
Gaming is also bringing in money for Tencent
Tencent is also home to Honour of Kings, the top-grossing mobile game in the world. The success of Honour of Kings contributed to an 84 percent increase in its smartphone gaming revenue in the third quarter. More than 50m people play the game on a daily basis.
The company is looking to replicate this success in Western markets. It is planning on launching a US version of the game, named Arena of Valour, however, it recently delayed the launch until next year. This is so Tencent can improve additional gameplay and social features of the game.
However, Tencent will be careful not to fully replicate Honour of Kings in a new market. Earlier this year it was forced to implement measures to limit the time children spent playing the game, following incidents.
The company’s president, Martin Lau, said Tencent will continue to keep investing in digital content to attract more paying customers.
It looks like Tencent’s success has no signs of slowing down.
