Tencent revenue growth slowest in seven years as net income misses forecasts

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[March 18, 2015] By Yimou Lee and Paul Carsten

HONG KONG/BEIJING (Reuters) - Tencent Holdings Ltd, China's biggest social network and online entertainment firm, saw its slowest revenue growth in seven years in the fourth quarter as net income missed forecasts and sharing and content costs ate into sales.

Revenue grew 24 percent to 20.978 billion yuan ($3.44 billion), though this was still slightly above forecasts of 20.5 billion yuan, on the back of strong sales from online gaming on PCs and smartphones linked to social networks like hit app WeChat, which now has 500 million monthly active users globally.

Net income for the quarter ending December rose 51 percent to 5.95 billion yuan ($955 million), below estimates of 6.26 billion yuan, according to a Thomson Reuters SmartEstimate poll of 11 analysts.

Online gaming sales accounted for over half of Tencent's total revenues.

Tencent has long depended on online gaming to generate revenue, but the company which competes on several fronts with Alibaba Group Holding Ltd and Baidu Inc also wants to emulate Facebook Inc's success in making money from mobile advertising as well as its online video platform.

The company also faces entrenched competition overseas to its WeChat app from rivals like WhatsApp, KakaoTalk and Line.

"(The) traditional way of advertising, investing money in order to attract users overseas, is coming to an end," Martin Lau, Tencent's president, told reporters at a media briefing in Hong Kong on Wednesday following the earnings results.

"The effectiveness is actually not as good, and to some extent in a lot of overseas markets, their mobile chat apps (are) already pretty dominant," he said. "From a marketing investment purpose, we are going back to China."

Tencent's expansion is coming at a price in China too, where it needs to draw heavy user traffic to attract advertisers.

Cost of revenues in the fourth quarter rose 2 percent year-on-year, largely due to a 59 percent jump in the cost of Tencent's social network and gaming business partly due to sharing and content costs, the company said.

Tencent said in 2015 it would focus on four areas. These include enabling offline business transactions with their mobile internet services, advertising, and building up its online payment system. Developing its digital content business is another goal, particularly for film, television, sports, music and literature.

(Reporting by Yimou Lee in HONG KONG and Paul Carsten in BEIJING; Editing by Miral Fahmy/Ruth Pitchford)

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