The market value of China’s largest social media company, Tencent Holdings, has surpassed that of Facebookwhich now has over 2 billion active users. It is the first time in history that an Asian company is worth more than 500 billion dollars.
The company owns WeChat, an application that combines online payments and instant messaging that has become very popular in China in recent years. In addition to the app, Tencent Holdings also owns online game franchises, such as the global hits League of Legends Y Honor of Kings.
great chinese fortune
Executive Ma Huateng is already richer than Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Bin, according to Forbes. The magazine valued this Tuesday Chinese fortune at 48,300 million dollars, which makes him the ninth richest man in the world.
Ma Huateng’s rating in the Forbes ranking increased after the announcement that it would bring the payment services of WeChat to Malaysia next year.
The company also has stakes in Snap, the company behind Snapchat, ride-hailing app Lyft, and the electric car manufacturer Tesla.
It is also expected that Tencent Holdings bring the game Honor of Kings to the United States. The game allows players to pay to upgrade character outfits. Critics in China accuse the game of being addictive.
Application strength outside of China
Tencent Holdings now joins a group of American companies you’ve probably heard of: Apple, Amazon and Microsoft.
Roughly a billion people, or half of China’s population, use the WeChat app, or “wei shin” as it’s called in China, every month. what started as uA messaging platform now allows you to pay for your purchasestake a taxi, invest, order food… and the list of possibilities of the application goes on.
Tencent hopes to export this Chinese phenomenon. But it has been difficult for the company to get people outside of China to adopt WeChat. According to analyst Robin Brant, the BBC’s political correspondent in Shanghai, the problem is not just the habit of populations in other countries who already have preferred applications.
Part of the resistance is due to fact that the company agreed long ago to censor content in Chinaand abroad, according to the mandate of the Chinese government.
Also exist security concerns because unlike other messaging apps, communications on WeChat are not encrypted.