Tencent added to Friday’s sharp decline to start the week, helping lead weakness in technology shares after the US’s move to ban residents from doing business with the company’s WeChat app.
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.
Index heavyweight Naspers dropped 4.4% after US President Donald Trump signed a pair of executive orders prohibiting US residents from doing business with the Chinese-owned TikTok and WeChat apps.
Washington’s plan to ban certain technologies of Chinese origin is a sign of “madness” in US secretary of state Mike Pompeo, China’s state-backed tabloid Global Times wrote in an editorial on Thursday.
The Trump administration’s move to ban US residents from doing business with Tencent’s WeChat app rippled through Chinese markets, erasing $46-billion from the Internet giant’s market value.
The Trump administration said on Wednesday it was stepping up efforts to purge “untrusted” Chinese apps from US digital networks and called TikTok and WeChat “significant threats”.
Tencent wants to merge China’s biggest game-streaming platforms, Huya and DouYu International, people familiar with the matter said, in a deal that would allow it to dominate the $3.4-billion arena.
Tencent proposed on Monday to buy all of the shares it doesn’t already own in Chinese search engine Sogou, taking the company private and delisting its shares from the New York Stock Exchange.
Zhang Yiming is the little-known Chinese entrepreneur who built TikTok into one of the most promising franchises on the Internet. Now the brainy, combative founder is under pressure to save the business.
South Africa’s benchmark equities index is set to erase its 2020 drop, staging a spectacular snap-back from its March trough following a surge in shares of market heavyweight Naspers.
