WeChat parent company Tencent exceeded expectations in Q3

pulse

November 16, 2017 4:19 PM

Tencent is ramping up investments in artificial intelligence (AI) to help the company continue its revenue growth and maintain momentum

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Tencent, the Chinese technology giant and owner of WeChat, exceeded expectations for Q3 2017,reportinga 61% year-over-year (YoY) increase in revenue to reach 65 billion yuan ($9.8 billion).

That’s up from the 40 billion yuan ($6 billion) in the same quarter last year. Growth was driven largely by the massive success of Tencent’s WeChat messaging app, its gaming business, and payments and cloud services.

Here are the highlights from Tencent’s Q3 2017 report.

Smartphone and PC games were key drivers of Tencent’s results.
Payments and cloud services revenue are also strong growth drivers.
WeChat hit record growth for the quarter.

Tencent is ramping up investments in artificial intelligence (AI) to help the company continue its revenue growth and maintain momentum. For Tencent’s messaging app WeChat, AI could help usher in the next wave of technology — it recently launched its own AI voice assistant, and if applied to WeChat, it will likely aid future growth of the platform and drive usage as voice becomes the next major interface.

Tencent also noted in its earnings that investments in AI cloud technologies fueled cloud services growth, and Tencent plans to open its cloud computing and AI technologies to third-party companies to help build out its cloud ecosystem.

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