First-quarter Tencent Holdings revenues grew 43 per cent to RMB31,995 million (US$4893 million).
The Chinese company’s subsidiaries provide media, entertainment, internet and mobile phone value-added services and online advertising services in Asia.
Revenues from its value-added service increased by 34 per cent to RMB24,964 million, while its online games business achieved 28 per cent growth, primarily driven by new smartphone games and key PC titles.
Tencent’s social networks attracted a 48 per cent rise in revenue to RMB7879 million, mainly through the growth of virtual item sales and also from digital content subscription services and QQ membership subscription services.
Revenues from online advertising business ballooned 73 per cent to RMB4701 million, while performance-based advertising, mainly driven by its mobile social and media platforms, had 90 per cent growth to RMB2532 million.
Brand display advertising revenues grew by 56 per cent to RMB2169 million, reflecting higher revenue contributions from Tencent’s mobile media platforms such as Tencent News and Tencent Video.
Mobile QQ usage benefited from enhanced features in areas such as video messaging and virtual gift exchanging. User activity in Interest Tribes, the interest-based communities embedded in QQ, benefited from enriched content discovery features, such as targeted feed-displays.
Tencent says the volume of commercial payments via Weixin Pay, such as eCommerce payments and O2O service transactions, grew significantly, while C2C transactions also increased in volume.