HONG KONG, Nov 12 (Reuters) - Tencent's
blockbuster game and solid advertising drove an 89% rise in
quarterly profit at the Chinese gaming and social media group,
helping it to beat forecasts on Thursday.
With its flagship game Honour of Kings reporting a record
100 million daily active users in the first 10 months of 2020,
Tencent, the world's largest gaming firm by revenue, has
benefited from growth of paying users for video games.
Tencent said on Thursday its profit was 38.5 billion yuan
($5.8 billion) for the three months through September. That was
ahead of an analyst average estimate of 30.81 billion yuan, data
from Refinitiv showed. Revenue rose 29% to 125.4 billion yuan.
The Chinese group, which celebrated its 22nd birthday on
Wednesday has a solid pipeline of new games waiting to be
released, including a testing launch of a mobile version of
League of Legends in Asia last month.
Tencent reported a return to normal in advertising activity
after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, with rapid growth
in sectors such as education, internet services and e-commerce.
Its shares closed up 4.72%, against a 0.22% decline in the
Hang Seng index, rebounding from a 7% drop on Wednesday
when investors dumped shares in Chinese tech companies following
publication of draft anti-monopoly rules.
These wiped hundreds of billions of dollars off the value of
some tech giants including Alibaba.
Tencent President Martin Lau told in a post-results call
that the draft anti-trust regulations are not new or unique to
China, adding that as tech companies get bigger the new
regulations reflect the new reality.
Beijing is still supportive of the industry and Tencent will
work with the regulators to ensure compliance, he added.
"For games, which are essentially individual products rather
than a platform, I think they are less of a focus," Lau said.
China has also issued draft rules to boost the oversight of
online micro-lending, a sector Tencent is also involved in the
through WeBank, which derailed Ant Group's blockbuster IPO.
Lau said there will not be a lot of changes in Tencent's
fintech strategy as a result of the proposed micro-lending rules
and its business is in compliance with regulations.
Tencent said revenue from its cloud and other business
services, a potential future growth engine, grew more slowly as
a result of the lingering impact of the pandemic, with delays in
areas such as project deployment and new contract sign-ups.
(Reporting by Pei Li; Editing by David Evans, Emelia
Sithole-Matarise, Barbara Lewis and Alexander Smith)