If you don’t know, the chief executive officer of Tencent is Ma Huateng, best known as Pony Ma. The Chinese business magnate is also an investor, politician, and philanthropist, and is now known as “China’s richest person.”
Tencent publishes games and helps other companies develop games too. Often, the company buys stakes in businesses and has a portfolio of over 800 studios relying on it as of this writing.
Moreover, Tencent also has plans on shaking up the U.S. games industry by using popular characters to make a big impression on those in North America. So far, the company is inching ever so close to making that dream a reality by setting up a new studio in California that will churn out triple-A blockbuster games.
Right now, the Chinese conglomerate needs to fill 13 game-related positions in the studio based in California to make as many high profile games as possible to appeal to those in the west.
Furthermore, the coronavirus has been helping the company since people have been turning to the tech giant’s subsidiaries and other parts connected to Tencent. As per website bloomberg.com, Tencent has seen a $40 billion surge this week, and the recent ascent has reshuffled the ranking of “China’s richest people.”
The country’s largest game developer has surpassed Alibaba as Asia’s most valuable company, with its shares rising above HK$500 in trading on June 24th, 2020, for the first time.
Tencent’s Pony Ma, worth $50 billion, has surpassed Jack Ma’s $48 billion fortune, becoming China’s richest person:
“The coronavirus pandemic has accelerated the digitization of the workplace and changed consumers’ habits, boosting shares of many internet companies.
Tencent has come a long way since hitting a low in 2018, when China froze the approval process for new games. Since then, the stock has almost doubled, and last month the tech giant reported a 26% jump in first-quarter revenue.”
Here’s the latest list of video game studios and other companies that Tencent has a Stake in as of June 2020:
- Riot Games – 100%
- Sharkmob – 100%
- Supercell – 84.3%
- Grinding Gear Games – 80%
- Epic Games – 40%
- Fatshark – 36%
- Stunlock Studios – 31%
- Glu Mobile – 21%
- Funcom – 29%
- Marvelous – 20%
- Netmarble – 17.6%
- Kakao – 13.5%
- Tesla Motors – 12%
- Bluehole – 10%
- Sumo Group and Sumo Digital – 10%
- Frontier Developments – 9%
- Ubisoft – 5%
- Activision Blizzard – 5%
- Paradox Interactive – 5%
- Yager – undisclosed minority share
- PlatinumGames – undisclosed capital investment
As seen above, Tencent has a hand in a lot of well-known companies. Nevertheless, other popular services such as Reddit and Discord have received funding from Tencent too:
- Reddit – received $150 million investment from Tencent early in 2019 (2020 payment unknown)
- Discord – received $158 million in funding in 2018 from Tencent (2019 and 2020 payments unknown)
You can learn more about Tencent and its CEO by paying bloomberg.com a visit.
