Just last year, the world’s most valuable start-up, ByteDance, was being squeezed from all sides. For all the obstacles, the company kept growing. Now its founder, 38-year-old Zhang Yiming, is among the world’s richest people.
Chinese gaming and social media group Tencent Holdings, partially owned by Naspers spin-off Prosus, on Wednesday reported a market-beating 26% jump in quarterly sales, helped in part by its online gaming business.
Pony Ma, founder of Naspers affiliate Tencent Holdings, China’s biggest social media and videogames company, met with antitrust watchdog officials this month to discuss compliance at his group, sources said.
Pony Ma’s Tencent Holdings has been put on notice. Asia’s largest conglomerate was censured by China’s antitrust watchdog on Friday as Beijing expands a crackdown that began with Jack Ma’s online empire.
Tencent joined much of China’s Internet sector in a $290-billion selloff on Wednesday after Beijing signalled its strongest intentions yet to rein in Big Tech. Yet it’s in some ways better shielded than its peers.
The mid-level bureaucrats left China’s richest man waiting as they prepared for a meeting that would send shockwaves across the financial world.
Just as the Chinese duo of Jack Ma and Pony Ma have carved up major chunks of their country’s Internet businesses, the battle for control of 1.3 billion Indians’ data could become a two-horse race.
Tencent, one of Asia’s biggest companies, is little known beyond the tech world. But its WeChat super app has more than a billion users worldwide.
A swathe of the world is adopting China’s vision for a tightly controlled Internet over the unfettered American approach, a stunning ideological coup for Beijing that would have been unthinkable less than a decade ago.
There’s only one stock in Asia that’s really mattered this year – Tencent Holdings, in which South Africa’s Naspers has a 33.2% stake. A 76% surge in its Hong Kong shares has lifted the company’s value by US$175bn (R2.3 trillion