WeChat app boosts Chinese internet service portal Tencent’s profit
Tencent, China’s leading internet service portal, yesterday reported a 59 per cent jump in profit during the quarter to the end of June on the back of a boom in smartphone gaming and mobile messaging.
Mobile game revenue from its messaging app WeChat, and social network Mobile QQ, jumped two-thirds to 3bn yuan (£291.7m) in the quarter.
WeChat’s user base grew to 438m, up from 396m during the previous quarter, putting it within reach of WhatsApp’s industry-leading 500m users.
China’s biggest listed tech firm saw total revenues rise 37 per cent to 19.75bn yuan during the quarter, with profits of 5.84bn yuan.
“Revenue growth in the online game business mainly reflected contributions from smartphone games integrated with Mobile QQ and Weixin, as well as growth in PC client games,” said Tencent in its results statement.
Tencent is part of the Chinese IT triumvirate known as the BAT (Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent), who emerged out of core competencies in search, e-commerce and social networking to dominate China’s digital economy.