But once the dust settles, Tencent will have to contend with a renewed challenge from giants like Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and ByteDance Ltd. that are increasingly encroaching on its turf. Like in Silicon Valley years ago, when the biggest cash-rich players from Amazon.com Inc. to Facebook Inc. invaded each other’s territories, China’s largest tech corporations can now resume expanding beyond their mainstay businesses and developing services from advertising to gaming and payments in direct competition with Tencent.
“These large internet platforms are ambitious and they will try to leverage their scale to go into businesses which are not core to them. Over the years I have seen many of them try to do it, but so far none has succeeded at overtaking the incumbent,” said Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Vey-Sern Ling. “I think large companies will continue to focus on strengthening their core, while engaging in battles with their rivals on the fringe.”
Read more: ByteDance Launches Global Hiring Spree With 10,000 New Jobs
TikTok operator ByteDance has been luring users and advertisers away and into its viral social networks. It’s also readying a foray into hardcore gaming. Alibaba-backed Ant Financial is creating its own version of a lite-app universe, taking a leaf from the book of Tencent’s WeChat. And even Pinduoduo Inc. — a Groupon-like platform backed by Tencent itself — has turned to live-streaming and virtual gifts to keep consumers glued to its app.
Their efforts coincide with a maturing of Tencent’s gaming business. Marquee titles like Honor of Kings and Peacekeeper Elite picked up millions of new players during virus lockdowns — yet not everyone’s a loyal patron. Its mobile game revenue for the first quarter may shrink sequentially due to weak performance from these aging hits, according to Bloomberg Intelligence citing Sensor Tower data. New releases from Alibaba’s gaming unit and Bilibili Inc. jumped in sales in recent weeks, according to the analytics firm, trailing closely behind Tencent’s two offerings.
Longer term, ByteDance appears the more significant threat. It’s looking to exploit its social platforms to distribute games where players will splurge on virtual weapons and cosmetics, much as Tencent did more than a decade ago when it first entered the arena. ByteDance has built a gaming division with more than 1,000 people — including hires from Tencent — and is planning to launch two hardcore games this spring, Bloomberg News has reported.
Read more: Tencent Takes Marquee Game on its Biggest Global Push in Years
Competition at home has spurred Tencent to increasingly look overseas for future growth. It’s taken Honor of King’s global edition to scores of new markets from Russia to the Middle East. International titles contributed 23% of Tencent’s online games revenue in 2019’s final quarter. It’s also planning to launch music app Joox to Africa’s most populous nations.
And it’s exploring new markets. Taken together, fintech and cloud services are now its fastest-growing division, making up more than a quarter of the company’s revenue in 2019.
Its fintech business took a surprising hit in the first quarter, after the brick-and-mortar stores that account for the bulk of WeChat payments shuttered nationwide to contain Covid-19. Ant Financial’s Alipay, meanwhile, is seeking to draw more merchants and transactions partially by replicating the lite-app model WeChat championed. Alipay’s own mini programs — featured more prominently in a recent upgrade and used for everything from hotel booking to tax filing — now have more than 600 million monthly active users, according to Ant Financial.
For cloud, the pandemic boosted Tencent’s nascent consumer-facing division as workers stranded at home had to rely on collaborative office software. But enterprise customers — a more significant source of revenue — were forced to delay their projects. Tencent’s cloud service revenues surpassed 17 billion yuan ($2.4 billion) in 2019, versus rival Alibaba’s 35.5 billion yuan. Alibaba said last month it will invest 200 billion yuan on cloud infrastructure such as data centers over the next three years.
What Bloomberg Intelligence Says
The company’s social-ad business could continue to grow strongly, despite challenging industry conditions, on high demand and new inventory released in mid-February, but its fintech and business services segment could deliver slower growth as offline payments declined during the pandemic and some cloud computing projects were delayed.
