Tencent really has come a long way over the past few years, and most recently passed $100 billion in market value with just a handful of products. Founded in 1998, Tencent’s rapid growth has been due to its ability to change direction when needed. Speaking at the China 2.0 conference at Stanford University, Tencent president Martin Lau explained that the company moved more than half of its 20,000 employees to mobile development when it became apparent how fast the mobile market was growing.
Since that time, Tencent’s mobile portfolio has achieved impressive results. Looking at monthly active users, Tencent’s mobile messaging tool Weixin has 236 million MAU, its QQ instant messenger has 818 million MAU, Tencent mail has 274 million MAU, and Tencent Weibo microblogging has 220 million MAU.
“A lot of people say, ‘You have a hodgepodge of different services, so what is the core ’” Lau said. “The core, I would say, is the comprehensive social infrastructure. At core, we are a social company.”
Tencent has racked up an impressive $4.5 billion in revenue for the first half of 2013 alone, and only nine percent of that has come from ads. Over half (53 percent) of Tencent’s revenue came from games, mostly from the sale of virtual goods in games — that’s an annual game revenue of over $4 billion, making Tencent one of the largest game companies in the world. Some 70 percent of Tencent’s overall revenue came from the sale of virtual goods, with the rest coming from ecommerce.
Tencent has invested heavily in U.S. game companies in recent years, with hundreds of millions invested in Riot Games, Epic Games, and most recently Activision.
Source: AllthingsD
