Chinese tech company Tencent is a gaming giant and the parent company of WeChat, the ubiquitous social messaging app in China.
Cheng Xin | Getty Images News | Getty Images
Tencent on Wednesday posted a fourth-quarter beat on top and bottom line driven by a surge in gaming and advertising revenue.
The company also notched a ramp-up in capital expenditure, which more than tripled in 2024, as it presses ahead with boosting its focus on artificial intelligence amid intense competition from Chinese rivals like Alibaba. Tencent touted a hike in AI-related revenue in areas such as cloud computing and advertising.
Here’s how Tencent did in the fourth quarter of 2024 versus Refinitiv estimates:
- Revenue: 172.4 billion Chinese yuan ($23.9 billion), versus 168.9 billion yuan expected.
- Profit attributable to equity holders of the company: 51.3 billion yuan, compared with 46.03 billion yuan expected.
Revenue rose 11% year-on-year while profit was up 90% versus the same period in 2023.
Tencent is known as one of the world’s biggest gaming firms. Domestic games revenue in China rose 23% year-on-year to 33.2 billion yuan in the fourth quarter. Tencent said this hike was due to a low base in the prior year’s period, as well as growth in some of its hit games, including Honour of Kings and Peacekeeper Elite.
The annual growth rate for domestic games accelerated in the December quarter, compared with the previous three-month period.
International games revenue jumped 15% year-on-year to 16 billion. Over the past few years, Tencent has stepped up efforts overseas with games like PUBG Mobile, as the domestic games market slowed amid macroeconomic and regulatory headwinds.
Tencent’s marketing services — or its advertising business — grew 17% year-on-year to 35 billion yuan in the fourth quarter. Tencent runs WeChat, China’s biggest messaging app with more than 1.38 billion monthly active users. The company has been working on monetizing those users through different advertising products such as video and search.
AI boost
While Tencent is one of the world’s biggest gaming companies, the tech giant has also placed a large focus on becoming a key artificial intelligence player in China over the last two years, putting out various AI models.
On Tuesday, the company launched its Hunyuan3D-2.0 model which can turn text or images into 3D graphics. In February, Tencent had unveiled Turbo S, an AI model designed to answer user queries as quickly as possible.
Tencent said that AI is driving improvements across various products inside the company.
Tencent said its marketing services business growth has been driven by “robust” advertiser demand as well as “ongoing enhancement of our AI-powered advertising infrastructure.” Tencent’s AI models allow it to serve uses with “more relevant ad recommendations,” the company said.
Meanwhile, AI cloud revenue approximately doubled year-on-year in 2024, Tencent said, though it declined to give a specific sales number.
Tencent’s cloud computing business is housed under its fintech and business service division, which posted 3% year-on-year growth in the fourth quarter to 56.1 billion yuan.
However, Tencent said that increasing use of graphics processing units for internal uses has “limited” the amount of the chips that are available for external clients and therefore has held back cloud services revenue growth too.
GPUs are key semiconductors required for the training and use of AI applications.
Tencent said that, starting from the fourth quarter, it has “stepped up” purchases of GPUs and it expects “accelerated revenue” for cloud services as a result.
Spending ramps up
Tencent’s AI focus has come with increased spending, with the company’s capital expenditure of 2024 totaling 76.8 billion yuan — more than tripling from 23.89 billion in 2023. Tencent said some of this spending went toward servers and graphics processing units.
Tencent said it has re-organized teams and that the increased investments will boost growth.
“Starting a few months ago, we have reorganised our AI teams to sharpen focus on both fast product innovation and deep model research, increased our AI-related capital expenditures, and increased our R&D and marketing efforts for our AI-native products,” Tencent said in its earnings statement.
“We believe these stepped-up investments will generate ongoing returns via uplifting productivity in our advertising business and longevity of our games, as well as longer term value from accelerated consumer usage of our AI applications and enterprise adoption of our AI services.”
Investors are still watching out for how Tencent plans to monetize its AI investments, particularly on its consumer-facing products, like WeChat.
On that front Tencent is working with its own AI models, as well as with those of its rivals. The company has its in-house AI chatbot called Yuanbao, which is based on its own Hunyuan foundational model as well as DeepSeek’s R1. Tencent has also sought to integrate DeepSeek’s technology across some of its other products, including WeChat’s search features in China.
Tencent said during an earnings call that it has deployed AI internally but is “prepared for breakout growth in consumer AI interactions” with products such as Yuanbao and WeChat.
Revenue from search in Weixin, the name of WeChat for China-based users, more than doubled year-on-year in the December quarter, Tencent said.
The Shenzhen-headquartered firm’s AI push is emblematic of the current state of competition among China’s tech giants, which has been spurred on by startup DeepSeek and its highly efficient artificial intelligence model that was released earlier this year.
AI updates have been released thick and fast from companies including Alibaba and Baidu.
Last week, Alibaba launched a new version of its AI assistant app that will be powered by its own Qwen AI reasoning model. Baidu on Sunday released two new models including a new reasoning model.
