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 It has quietly built one of the world's largest payments systems,
with transactions which could total more than $500 billion this
year, according to Reuters calculations.
While most of Tencent's money still comes from online gaming, it has
also developed a hit mobile messaging app called WeChat which had
697 million monthly active users at the end of December, up from 650
million at the end of September.
And it is building new businesses on WeChat, including gaming,
social advertising akin to Facebook Inc's <FB.O>, and mobile
banking. Tencent does not disclose whether it is making money from
its mobile payments business.
However Tencent's fourth quarterly earnings report on Thursday,
which showed overall revenue grew at its quickest rate in three
years and beat analysts' estimates, also revealed how much it paid
banks in fees for customers sending each other money via WeChat.
These fees, which Tencent Chief Executive Pony Ma said amount to 0.1
percent of each transaction, were more than 300 million yuan in
January. That would mean such transactions on WeChat Payment totaled
over 300 billion yuan ($46 billion) that month, according to Reuters
calculations.
And this figure does not include transactions for popular services
such as paying for taxis, restaurants and online media like video
games and music.
If that pace continues for the rest of the year, Tencent will see at
least 3.6 trillion yuan ($556 billion) transacted across WeChat
Payment in 2016. That would make it almost twice as big as all of
PayPal Holdings Inc's $282 billion in transactions in 2015.
WeChat Payment has also become a serious rival to Alibaba Group
Holding Ltd, whose Alipay dominated online payments in China before
WeChat Payment.
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Alipay had a total payment volume of $519 billion in 2013, the last
year Alibaba or Alipay published such figures.
As for Alipay's mobile payments, most similar to WeChat Payment,
these were 900 billion yuan ($139 billion) in 2013, although Alipay
has since grown, as smartphone use has spread in China. A
spokeswoman for Ant Financial Services Group, the holding company
for Alipay, declined to comment.
Tencent's revenue for the three months through December grew 45
percent from a year earlier to 30.4 billion yuan, topping the 27.88
billion average forecast of 12 analysts polled by Reuters.
The group's online advertising revenue more than doubled in the
period to 5.7 billion yuan, while net income rose 22 percent to 7.16
billion yuan, its slowest rate in three quarters.
($1 = 6.4743 Chinese yuan renminbi)
(Editing by Christopher Cushing and Alexander Smith)
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