BEIJING: Tencent Holdings Ltd, China’s biggest social network and online entertainment firm, beat analyst estimates with a third-quarter revenue rise of 34 percent, its fastest rate in five quarters, partly due to a surge in advertising income.
Overall July-September revenue hit 26.59 billion yuan (US$4.18 billion), compared with the 25.26 billion yuan average estimate of 15 analysts in a Thomson Reuters poll.
Revenue in the firm’s value-added services category grew 28 percent on year to 20.55 billion yuan, boosted by new smartphone and personal-computer games, as well as social network income.
Tencent attributed its 102 percent rise in advertising revenue to 4.9 billion yuan to an enlarged advertiser base, with 65 percent of that revenue generated on mobile platforms.
“Our online game business achieved healthy growth in revenues, mainly driven by new smartphone games and key PC client games,” Tencent said in a filing to the Hong Kong stock exchange.
“Our social networks revenues expanded, reflecting increased contributions from both subscription services and in-game item sales within our mobile social networking platforms.”
The operator of China’s most popular messaging app, WeChat, recently ramped up advertising sales, following the lead of US social media peer Facebook Inc. Conversely, Facebook is making its messaging apps more like Tencent’s, which offers services from mobile gaming to taxi hailing and personal wealth management.
Tencent’s net quarterly income hit 7.45 billion yuan, versus an average estimate of 7.67 billion yuan, marking year-on-year jump of 39 percent.
Global monthly users of WeChat reached 650 million at the end of September, Tencent said, or an on-year growth of 39 percent. Its QQ social networking platform, another popular service in China, hit 639 million users.
