On 19 March, Chinese tech giant Tencent released its financial report for Q4 and the full year 2024. In the last quarter of 2024, Tencent earned 172.45 billion RMB (23.85 billion USD) in revenue, an 11% year-on-year (YoY) growth. Non-IFRS operational profit was 59.46 billion RMB (8.22 billion USD), up 21% YoY. For the full year last year, Tencent saw its earnings grow 8% YoY to 660.3 billion RMB (91.32 billion USD), and non-IFRS operational profit was 237.81 billion RMB (32.89 billion USD), a 24% increase.
Tencent emphasised how AI helped push all three of its key businesses into growth. In Q4, the revenue of the value-added service from Tencent reached 79.02 billion RMB (10.93 billion USD), up 14% YoY, with both gaming seeing double-digit growth both in and outside China.
Marketing services grew 17% to 35 billion RMB (4.84 billion USD), mostly from the optimisation of ad services, channels, mini programs, the search function and the store function on Weixin (the domestic version) and WeChat. Fintech and enterprise service earned 56.13 billion RMB (7.72 billion RMB), up 3%, mostly coming from AI upgrades and business diversification of products such as WeCom and VooV Meeting.
Tencent invested 39 billion RMB (5.39 billion USD) in developing AI projects in the final quarter of last year. Martin Lau, the president of Tencent, announced that Tencent’s Yuanbao, an application of its Hunyuan large language model (LLM), is now the number 3 native AI app in China in terms of daily active users. With positive annual results from both Tencent and Xiaomi, tech-related stocks in the Hong Kong Stock Exchange (HKEX) surged on 19 March. From Alibaba’s latest report, it would seem that the AI arms race is now on among Chinese tech companies.
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