And mobile chat is a natural extension for Tencent.
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Numerous strong Chinese online game operators compete head-to-head for MMORPG market share, but Tencent reigns supreme for advanced casual games.
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Jim Breyer of Accel Partners, who ranked number one on the recent Forbes Midas list, has an affiliate team scouring China looking for the next Tencent.
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Others have been exposed by online activism and muck-raking, which makes it all the more intriguing that Xi, or his advisors, singled out Tencent for a visit during his Shenzhen sojourn.
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WeChat's user base includes much of China's smartphone-owning middle class, a highly attractive target for advertising, but Tencent says it is still improving user experience and has no plans to make money off the service yet.
And while growth in revenue is largely led by Japan and the US, China is proving to be fertile ground for growth in downloads, with companies like Tencent (which controls the charts for the country with no less than 5 of the top 10 social networking apps in China) becoming large new entrants in the market.
Many tech firms renowned for innovation, such as Apple, Amazon, Tencent, and even Tesla are also known for normative control.
Tencent has a big ambition for WeChat and envisioned it to be a social mobile platform.
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He notes that TenCent was a logical partner for the company on Call of Duty, given that they already host a similar military combat game called CrossFire which lately has been running at 4 million peak concurrent users a day, and tens of millions of players overall.
Tencent is well known in China for its instant messenger program QQ, with more than 600 million accounts.
Tencent has been slow to tap it for revenues, preferring to cross-subsidise from games and other revenue sources.
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You drive from Hong Kong over to Kowloon, you can see a Tencent Weibo billboard that has been there for months.
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Sina, for example, is emerging as a serious competitor to Tencent and Baidu in China.
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"We have worked closely with Tencent to create a game with broad appeal for the Chinese market, " he added.
Tencent did not disclose how much it paid for the shares on Tuesday, but industry rumors say the company bid ahead of Warner Brothers to acquire the position.
"We found that more and more elements were added to the show, and we felt that they might be walking away from the original intention -- grass-roots party for grass roots, " says Dong Xianhui, who runs Tencent's news page.
In the first quarter, online gaming provided more than half of Tencent's overall revenue, compared with 6% for the company's advertising business.
Other features will probably persist, for example the dominance of three digital conglomerates, Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent.
Last year was a watershed year for users of weibo sites such as those run by Sina Corp and Tencent Holdings.
Yet sceptics may again underestimate how quickly both can grow and what Zynga, for instance, is worth in combination with Facebook: taken together they look much like Tencent.
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Yesterday, however, the PBoC told Alipay competitor Tenpay (controlled by Tencent) that their VIE structure was invalid, causing a great deal of worry for them of the future of that business.
Chinese BBSes and social networks such as Renren are filled with egao, Internet parodies, that slam Qihoo and Tencent but generally hit Tencent harder. (Check out a few good ones in this ChinaHush post.) The Chinese press has chastised both companies, but, for its part, Qihoo (and 360) may come out of the melee relatively unscathed so long as Tencent continues to overreact.
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