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Tencent punts WeChat for overseas growth

Shanghai - Tencent Holdings, China's largest online gaming and social networking company, will heavily invest in its popular Weixin mobile chatting application to attract more overseas users, the company said on Wednesday.

Weixin, called WeChat in English-speaking markets, already has more than 300 million users, Tencent said in its earnings statement.

The company plans to integrate more functions such as games and content apps into Weixin and step up marketing and advertising outside China.

"We will continue to invest heavily in such downstream activities, including e-commerce and advertising, so as to fully capture the revenue opportunities surrounding our platforms," the company said.

It did not provide further details.

Tencent Holdings posted a 36.5% rise in fourth-quarter profit from a year ago, meeting analysts' expectations on robust sales of online games. An increase in overseas active paying users drove profit growth, with the "League of Legends" game gaining popularity, the company added.

Overall fourth-quarter revenue rose 53.4% from a year earlier to 12.2 billion yuan ($1.96bn), in line with analysts' estimates of 12.1 billion yuan.

Revenue from internet-value-added services, which includes online games, was 8.5 billion yuan and contributed 70% to total revenue.

Revenue from e-commerce transactions rose 48% from the previous quarter to 1.7 billion yuan.

China's business-to-consumer e-commerce market was worth 169 billion yuan in the fourth quarter by transaction value. Alibaba Group's Taobao Mall had 51% of the market while Tencent had 4.6% of the market.

Shares of Tencent, which is more than 30% owned by South African media group Naspers [JSE:NPN], closed up 1.4% on Wednesday before its results were announced, versus a 1% rise for the Hang Seng Index.  

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