Tencent overtakes Alibaba – Tencent became China’s top technology company after a strong quarter. Alibaba is now worth $246 billion compared to Tencent’s $249 billion. Not a lot more, but more, and that’s all that counts. The company’s shares in Hong Kong increased by over 6% after a 47% increase in profit to 10.9 billion Yuan ($1.6 billion) in the second April – June quarter.
Most of this increase in income was due to advertising and particularly its online gaming business. Tencent is now the largest of the three Titans of China’s internet businesses, the other two being Alibaba and the search engine firm Baidu. Tencent is best known for its WeChat messaging app which is huge in China, yet relatively unknown elsewhere. It’s this app that with its 700 million users makes Tencent the largest online entity in China.
Tencent has grown steadily in China without much notice of it elsewhere. Perhaps that has something to do with the personality of Alibaba’s Jack Ma and the Baidu search engine being China’s answer to Google. WeChat, on the other hand, is China’s equivalent of Whatsapp, Facebook and Twitter rolled into one massive social media business.
Tencent has not made the most of WeChat yet it is still increasing in popularity. It may now focus on monetizing the app more. Those investing in the company are naturally hoping that it can be monetized in the same successful way as the Facebook and Twitter social platforms.
In June, Tencent announced that it would purchase a majority stake in Supercell, the Finnish company that developed the online game, Clash of Clans. This is just one of the successful games marketed by Supercell and it would be a good acquisition to bulk up the company’s online gaming offerings. Tencent is on the way up, and its seems they are unstoppable.
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