Tencent Q3 revenues hit $9.8bn

The world’s biggest games company has smashed expectations for its Q3 2017.

Tencent reported revenues of $9.8bn, which is up 61 per cent year-on-year and almost as much as EA and Activision combined. Its profits for the period hit $2.7bn, up 69 per cent. This represents the company’s strongest growth numbers since 2010.

PC grew 27 per cent to $2.2bn and mobile 84 per cent to $2.75bn. The standout performer was mobile hit Honour of Kings, as well as League of Legends from Tencent’s Riot Games.

Its messaging app WeChat, meanwhile, now has 980m monthly active users and sends 38bn daily messages. Timeline advertising revenue for the service grew 48 per cent to $1.6bn, and it also helped grow associated services such as Tencent’s payment platform, which grew by 280 per cent. It now also lays claim to China’s most watched streaming video service.

“During the third quarter of 2017, we recorded strong business and revenue growth across multiple business lines including games, digital content, online advertising and payment related services. In particular, our video platform gained audience and revenue market share, we believe it has become China’s top online video platform in terms of mobile daily active users and subscriptions,” chairman and CEO Ma Huateng said.

“We believe this success reflects our increasing investment in self-commissioned video content, our improved selection of licensed video content, and our scheduling and audience management initiatives. The listing of our online literature platform, China Literature, in November also reflects the value of our years of investment in the business. We believe our multi-faceted digital content businesses are synergistic with each other, and allow us to deliver unique content to our users.”

Tencent this year acquired a 12 per cent share of SnapChat owner Snap and two of its businesses – eBook company China literature and the Sogou search engine – recently held IPOs. It has previously failed to acquire WhatsApp.

The company is increasingly looking to overseas investment opportunities in an effort to fend off any fear from investors that its grip on the Chinese markets is reaching saturation point. It is also looking into other tech, such as marketing AI and autonomous vehicles.

Tencent revenue from mobile and PC games in Q3 2017 was $4.95 billion.

Both mobile and PC were up YoY.

As a reference. That's more than Activision Blizzard, Electronic Arts, Take Two and Ubisoft combined in Q3 2017.

— Daniel Ahmad (@ZhugeEX) November 15, 2017