Tencent

Tencent, officially known as Tencent Holdings Limited, is a multinational conglomerate headquartered in China, providing value-added and online advertising services. The Value-added Services segment involves online and mobile games, community value-added services, and applications across various Internet and mobile platforms while the Online Advertising segment represents display based and performance-based advertisements. The company was founded by Yi Dan Chen, Hua Teng Ma, Chen Ye Xu, Li Qing Zeng, and Zhi Dong Zhang in 1998 and is headquartered in Shenzhen, China.

The Chinese digital media and telecom behemoth has quickly become one of the biggest players in the internet gaming landscape. Tencent’s shareholdings in publicly listed investee companies (excluding subsidiaries), including those held via special purpose vehicles, was RMB982.8 billion in December 2021.

Tencent began its journey with OICQ messenger, which was renamed to QQ. During the mid-2000s, Tencent started to branch out into other areas, including licensing games. Things really started taking off for the company in 2011 with the launch of WeChat and Tencent’s acquisition of Riot Games.

The journey to fame and global success has not been easy but worth the wait. Today Tencent has stakes in multiple industries, offering services such as social networks, mobile games, smartphones, and other tech related products.

On its home turf Tencent is recognized as the company behind some of the biggest social media and messaging apps including QQ, WeChat, and Qzone. Tencent even has its own digital assistant, named Xiaowei, which can answer questions about the weather or traffic just like Alexa. If you look at the company’s actual presence and impact on daily lives Tencent apps and web services in China would seem endless, spanning mobile payment systems, cloud storage service, and a movie studio.

Our communications and social platforms Weixin and QQ connect users with each other, with digital content and daily life services in just a few clicks. Our high performance advertising platform helps brands and marketers reach out to hundreds of millions of consumers in China.

Our financial technology and business services support our partners’ business growth and assist their digital upgrade.

We invest heavily in talent and technological innovation, actively participating in the development of the Internet industry.

Tencent now plays a role in many triple-A titles around the world. Tencent owns League of Legends, and a portion of Fortnite and PUBG. It acquired Ubisoft stock in 2018, a majority stake in Grinding Gear Games (Path of Exile), and a sizable share of Riot Games, Epic Games, Activision Blizzard, and Supercell. That means juggernaut titles such as Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, Fortnite, and Clash of Clans are all influenced by Tencent. Not content to simply buy up shares in other developers and publishers, Tencent has created its own game design studio. Most recently, this resulted in the release of the popular Call of Duty Mobile game.

In December 2018, Tencent’s online music subscription platform, Tencent Music was spun-off and listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

LEADERSHIP

Ma Huateng
Co-Founder and CEO

The Management

Ma Huateng – Also known as Pony Ma, is a Chinese billionaire entrepreneur and the Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Tencent Holdings. As of January 2021, Ma is worth $46.8 billion, which places him at the thirty-first spot on the Forbes Real Times Billionaires List. Ma partly grew up in Shenzhen, a global center in technology and research and dubbed as “China’s Silicon Valley” by many. He graduated from Shenzhen University in 1993 with a degree in computer science. Ma co-founded Tencent in November 1998 together with college classmate Zhang Zhidong. The firm’s first product was instant messaging software.

Zhang Zhidong – The Co-Founder of Tencent Holdings. Zhang was born in 1972 in Dongguan in Guangdong province in Southern China. At the age of 18, he went to study computer science at Shenzhen University. He met Ma Huateng, the Founder, Chairman, and CEO of Tencent Holdings Ltd with him. In the year 1933, Zhang completed his Bachelor’s Degree. He enrolled for graduate studies at the South China University of Technology in Guangzhou and completed a Master Degree in 1996.

Dr. Charles CHEN Yidan – Another Founder and core team member at Tencent, Dr. Charles CHEN Yidan believes education promotes people’s well-being. It certainly changed the course of his life. After navigating China’s highly competitive gaokao university entrance exam, he earned a bachelor’s degree in applied chemistry at Shenzhen University.He went on to obtain a master’s degree in economic law at Nanjing University. Shortly after university, he became one of the core founders of China’s internet pioneer, Tencent, along with his high school friends, and found success.Stepping down as Tencent’s Chief Administration Officer in 2013, he is an Advisor Emeritus of Tencent and Honorary Chairman of Tencent Charity Foundation.
He continued his pursuit of learning, earning a doctorate in business administration from the Singapore Management University in 2019.Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Dr. Chen’s journey into learning is that his most important inspiration was his illiterate grandmother.