Tencent posted a lot more profit and turnover in the past quarter than a year earlier. The Chinese tech group benefited from customers spending more money on games like PUBG Mobile, Honor of Kings and League of Legends.
More money was also made with cloud services, offering storage space and software on the internet.
Tencent is known for, among other things, the chat app WeChat, which is widely used in China. The company’s revenue increased to 135 billion yuan in the quarter ended March 31, from 108 billion yuan a year earlier. During the same period, profits increased from 29 billion yuan to nearly 48 billion yuan. Tencent has announced that it wants to invest more in games, cloud services and short films this year.
Due to concerns that the Chinese government wants to tackle Tencent, more than 160 billion euros in the company’s stock market value has evaporated since January. The Chinese authorities have been taking stricter action against influential technology groups such as Alibaba for some time now. These companies hold a lot of power and, until recently, were bound by few rules.
Tencent has largely escaped Beijing’s policies so far. But news agency Reuters reported that the Chinese authorities will impose a fine of 1.3 billion euros on the company at the end of last month. The technology group did not make any statements about this in the figures update.