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Cape Town - Shares in Naspers [JSE:NPN] increased more than 2%, riding on a more than one-third growth in quarterly profit from its Chinese money spinner Tencent Holdings.
Naspers, which owns just over a third of China's largest online gaming and social networking company, increased 2.1% to R595.34 shortly after Tencent posted a 36.5% rise in fourth-quarter profit from a year ago, meeting analysts' expectations on robust sales of online games.
Tencent announced that it will heavily invest in its popular Weixin mobile chatting application to attract more overseas users.
Weixin, called WeChat in English-speaking markets, already has more than 300 million users, Tencent said in its earnings statement. WeChat was also recently launched to the South African market.
Tencent also plans to integrate more functions such as games and content apps into Weixin and step up marketing and advertising outside China.
Revenue from internet-value-added services, which includes online games, was 8.5bn yuan and contributed 70% to total revenue.
Revenue from e-commerce transactions rose 48% from the previous quarter to 1.7bn yuan.
Shares of Tencent closed up 1.4% on Wednesday before its results were announced, versus a 1% rise for the Hang Seng Index.
Naspers shares traded up 1.59% at R595.71, with over 4 million shares changing hands just before market close.
*Fin24 is part of Media24, a subsidiary of Naspers.
