Tencent revenue growth slows to a crawl following China’s crackdown on tech companies from buzai232's blog

Tencent revenue growth slows to a crawl following China’s crackdown on tech companies

Tencent Holdings has reported its slowest revenue growth on record, and cited China’s ongoing tech regulatory crackdown in a subsequent earnings call.To get more latest news on tencent, you can visit shine news official website.

Revenue throughout Q1 2022 reached 135.5 billion yuan, a marginal increase from 135.3 billion yuan a year ago. As such, profit for the period was 23.4 billion yuan – a 51 per cent year-on-year decrease from 47.8 billion in 2021.

Tencent’s gaming business earnings fell around 20 per cent to 10.6 billion yuan, which the company attributed to disappointing revenue from titles including PUBG Mobile, despite signs of considerable success for Krafton, of which Tencent is Krafton’s second-largest shareholder, with 15.35 per cent.

Regulated
Tencent attributed much of their decline to China’s regulatory crackdown on tech companies, including restrictions on duration of play for children. However, there are strong signs of a reversal of China’s strongarm tactics, including the recent decision to lift its games license freeze.

Although China has Martin Lau, president of Tencent, stated in an earnings call: “For this to translate to real impact on our business, there is going to be a time lag.

“It will take some time for the corrective measures to be turned into normalised regulation, and then the specific supportive measures will be introduced. We would be working closely with regulators in the hope of seeing this transition happen.”Tencent’s games revenue slowdown was not mirrored in the firm’s performance in 2021, which increased 9.9 per cent to almost 220 billion yuan.

Tencent Holdings Ltd said it will shut down a service that allowed Chinese gamers to access overseas platforms to play unapproved foreign games, in a sign of tightening compliance as Chinese regulators more closely scrutinize the industry.

The country’s largest social and gaming firm said late on Wednesday it will on May 31 update its games speed booster mobile and desktop apps to new versions that would only support games operating in China.

The new versions will no longer allow users to access foreign games.Tencent first launched the apps in 2018. Such apps, which other companies like NetEase Inc also offer, act as network acceleration tools that help users boost their internet speeds.Unlike most countries, gamers in China are only allowed to play titles approved by the government and are not allowed to play with foreigners on foreign servers. While such foreign games are not explicitly blocked by online curbs, local internet speeds are generally too slow for gamers to access them.

As such, many gamers in China used such apps in practice to access unapproved foreign games such as Grand Theft Auto or Nintendo Co Ltd’s smash-hit Animal Crossing. The apps also over the years became grey-area channels for foreign game developers to reach users in the world’s largest gaming market.

Tencent declined to provide further comment on why it had decided to make changes to the app. The move was greeted by Chinese gamers with dismay but also many said it was not surprising.This is expected given the direction things are going. It is harder to be a gamer in China by the day,” a Chinese internet user wrote on microblogging site Weibo.

The move comes days after China lifted a nine-month freeze on gaming licences. During this period gaming companies including Tencent made major adjustments to their business practices to comply with regulatory requests.