Tencent's business is about as big as Facebook's thanks to its stronghold in China (TCEHY, FB)

pulse

May 16, 2018 10:31 PM

Tencent’s social media platforms are to China as Facebook’s are to the rest of the world and yet the companies are similar in their financial outputs.

Facebook owns the world.

Tencent owns China.

As it turns out, each market is worth about the same when it comes to the social media business.

Facebook and Tencent both generated almost the same amount of revenue in the first three months of the year. And, as this chart from Statista shows, Tencent's three main social media platforms have a combined user base of 2.4 billion, slightly above Facebook's 2.2 billion users.

Because of restrictions in China, popular social media platforms like Facebook, Facebook-owned Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat aren’t accessible in the country, making way for Tencent’s WeChat, QQ, and Qzone. As the value of the Chinese market continues to grow however, so will the pressure on Facebook to figure out a way to operate in the country.

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