Tencent : Announcement of the Annual Results for the year ended 31 December 2018

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ANNOUNCEMENT OF THE ANNUAL RESULTS FOR THE YEAR ENDED 31 DECEMBER 2018

The Board is pleased to announce the audited consolidated results of the Group for the year ended 31 December 2018. The results have been audited by the Auditor in accordance with International Standards on Auditing. In addition, the results have also been reviewed by the Audit Committee.

FINANCIAL PERFORMANCE HIGHLIGHTS

Unaudited Three months ended

31 December 2018

31 Year- 30 December on-year September 2017 change 2018

Quarter-on-quarter change

(RMB in millions, unless specified)Revenues Gross profit Operating profit Profit for the period Profit attributable to equity holders of the

84,896 35,152 17,288 14,026

66,392 31,495 25,724 21,622

28% 12% -33% -35%

80,595 5% 35,480 -1% 27,861 -38% 23,405 -40%

Company Non-GAAP profit attributable to equity holders of the Company EPS (RMB per share)

14,229

20,797

-32%

23,333 -39%

19,730

17,454

13%

19,710 1

- basic

- diluted Non-GAAP EPS (RMB per share)

1.505 1.489

2.206 2.177

-32% -32%

2.469 -39% 2.440 -39%

- basic

- diluted

2.087 2.065

1.852 1.827

13% 13%

2.085 1 2.061 1

Year ended 31 December

Year-on-year 2018 2017 change (RMB in millions, unless specified)Revenues

312,694 237,760 32%

Gross profit

142,120 116,925 22%

Operating profit

97,648

90,302 8%

Profit for the year

79,984

72,471 10%

Profit attributable to equity holders of the Company

78,719

71,510 10%

Non-GAAP profit attributable to equity holders of the Company

77,469

65,126 19%

EPS (RMB per share)

- basic

- diluted

8.336 8.228

7.598 10%

7.499 10%

Non-GAAP EPS (RMB per share)

- basic

- diluted

8.203 8.097

6.920 19%

6.830 19%

DIVIDEND

The Board has recommended the payment of a final dividend of HKD1.00 per share (2017: HKD0.88 per share) for the year ended 31 December 2018, subject to the approval of the shareholders at the 2019 AGM. Such proposed dividend will be payable on 31 May 2019 to the shareholders whose names appear on the register of members of the Company on 22 May 2019.

BUSINESS REVIEW AND OUTLOOK

1. Company Strategic Highlights

2018 marked the 20th anniversary of the founding of the Group. Throughout our history, we have constantly been embracing changes in users' needs, technologies and market conditions to stay at the forefront of our industry. In October, we initiated a strategic organisational upgrade to extend our strengths in the Consumer Internet and to capture the opportunities of the Industrial Internet. This strategic upgrade is intended to enable us to drive the convergence of social, content and technology trends, and to better serve enterprises, as well as consumers.

During the year, we stepped up our investment in innovation and technologies to stay competitive in the evolving Internet industry. We enriched our social platforms with a broader portfolio of digital content, as well as online and offline services, thus deepening our connection with our users, advertisers, merchants and enterprise partners. Through these initiatives, we strengthened our market leadership in social, games, digital content, and payment, contributing to continuing growth across our core business segments.

We made the following key achievements in our core businesses:

Our social communications platforms, Weixin and QQ, represent the largest social communities in China in terms of MAU. The combined MAU of Weixin and WeChat increased to approximately 1,098 million by the end of 2018. Weixin further penetrated lower tier cities and covered a wider age group of users. On average, over 750 million Weixin users read friends' posts on Moments per day.

Mini Programs are now widely adopted by users and enterprises setting the industry trends for connecting online users to offline scenarios. DAU grew rapidly and daily visits per user increased by 54% year-on-year. Mini Programs cover more than 200 service sectors and connect with our users via multiple channels, including shortcuts in the chat interface, our in-app search function and offline Mini Programs QR Codes. In addition to connecting with online users, Mini Programs enable developers to achieve cross-platform development and instantaneous deployment for their products and services. We empower developers with cloud-based development kits, enhancing the development efficiency, particularly for long-tail developers. Daily visits to long-tail Mini Programs increased significantly, accounting for 43% of the total daily visits to Mini Programs.

Overall MAU of QQ increased to 807 million by the end of 2018 . We stayed engaged with young users as QQ introduced innovative and AI-empowered features to make its chat experience more fun and interactive. We offer entertainment-oriented content in verticals including eSports, comics and live streaming services to cater to the entertainment needs of millennial users. In particular, we further increased the user engagement of QQ KanDian, a popular news feed service among young users, through enriching its content with video feeds.

We have built up a content ecosystem covering online games, literature, video, music, news and comics. For online games, we are the leading platform globally by revenue and users. Our technical strength supports the operation of multiple PC and mobile blockbuster game titles, serving hundreds of millions of active users every day. Internationally, our subsidiary Riot Games operates the highest-MAU PC game, League of Legends, and we operate the highest-MAU smart phone game, PUBG MOBILE. Through our partnerships with and investments in global leaders such as Epic Games (creator of Fortnite) and Supercell (creator of Clash of Clans), we support the innovation and growth of the global game industry. In China, our popular smart phone games expanded our user base and increased time spent. We have taken the lead in introducing the Healthy Gameplay System to assist parents in managing the amount of time their children spend playing games. We upgraded the system last September by introducing measures to strengthen real-name verification, and implementing game time limits for children players, as well as spending alerts to their parents. Our Tencent Game Guardian Platform enables parents to engage with their children and track their in-game activities online. We recently provided teachers access to this platform to enhance their engagement with their students who play games. These initiatives built a pilot case for the China game industry and, we believe, help position it for sustainable and healthy growth in the long run.

Leveraging our rich IP portfolio, we provide digital content to our users across online media platforms. Our total digital content subscription counts exceeded 100 million by the end of 2018, up 50% year-on-year. High quality content, better IP protection, enhanced streaming capabilities and convenience of mobile payment were the growth drivers for our digital content subscription business. Tencent Video is the leading online video streaming platform in China in terms of mobile DAU and subscriptions, generating the highest revenues in the online video market in China through subscriptions and advertising. TME is the leading online music entertainment platform in China, operating the country's most popular and innovative music apps - QQ Music, Kugou Music, Kuwo Music and WeSing. In December 2018, we listed TME on the New York Stock Exchange. News feeds, short videos and mini videos contributed substantially to traffic on our media and distribution platforms including Tencent News, QQ KanDian, Mobile QQ Browser and Weishi.

During 2018, we enhanced the monetisation potential of our platforms through connecting more advertisers, across more platforms, with more accurate user targeting capabilities. For social advertising, we increased our advertising inventory through adding the second ad unit in Weixin Moments, and we started to insert ad units into Mini Programs. For media advertising, we completed the system revamp of our news advertising in early 2018. Leveraging our enhanced recommendation algorithms, steady traffic growth and rising fill rates, our news feed business significantly grew its advertising revenues. Our video advertising outpaced the industry in terms of its revenue amount and revenue growth rate, due to the popularity of our content, especially self-commissioned content, and the strong growth in sponsorship advertising revenue. As part of the Company's strategic reorganisation, we merged our advertising sales teams to provide better marketing solutions, data analytics, and ad placement processes for our advertisers, thus enhancing their ROIs.

Payment is one of the key infrastructure platforms of the Company, enabling us and our merchant partners to complete transactions for online and offline services. We extended our market leadership as the leading mobile payment platform by active users and number of transactions in China. Our total daily payment transaction volume exceeded 1 billion for 2018, driven by rapid growth in commercial payments, which represented more than half of the number of transactions. Our commercial payment revenue more than doubled year-on-year in 2018. Our payment platform connects with tens of millions of merchants and monthly active merchants increased over 80% year-on-year in the fourth quarter of 2018. We boosted our payment penetration in the food and retail industries thanks to features such as our Mini Programs and Scan-to-Pay solution. In Hong Kong, we launched the first-of-its-kind cross-border mobile payment service in October 2018, which enables WeChat Pay Hong Kong users to conduct RMB-denominated transactions funded by Hong Kong dollars. This cross-border mobile payment service now covers approximately 1 million merchants in Mainland China, including taxi-hailing, food ordering, and high-speed railway ticketing services. The transaction volume of WeChat Pay Hong Kong increased more than 10 times year-on-year. We launched WeChat Pay Malaysia services in August, offering online transactions such as mobile credit top-ups, flight and bus ticket purchases, and offline transactions at retail outlets, such as supermarkets, fashion and beauty stores. Globally, we are expanding our footprint by supporting China outbound travelers to make cross-border payments in overseas destinations, and we now offer real-time tax refund services for Weixin Pay users in over 80 airports. Weixin Pay is now available in 49 markets outside Mainland China, supporting cross-border payment transactions in 16 currencies.