Tencent Profit Beats Again on Strong Gaming, Marketing Revenue

By Sherry Qin

Tencent Holdings maintained double-digit net profit growth in the final quarter of 2025, topping market expectations, as the Chinese tech giant stepped up its artificial-intelligence efforts amid the sector's boom and fierce competition in China.

The WeChat operator, China's largest company by market capitalization, said Wednesday that fourth-quarter net profit rose 13.5% from a year earlier to 58.26 billion yuan, equivalent to $8.46 billion. That beat the 55.51 billion yuan estimated by analysts in a FactSet poll.

The videogame and social-media company's revenue climbed 13% to 194.37 billion yuan, exceeding analysts' expectations of 193.63 billion yuan.

The results capped a year of solid growth for China's most valuable company and come as it is upping its AI game. Previously focused on leveraging AI to boost productivity and reduce costs across various businesses, Tencent has accelerated its efforts in recent months, establishing a new AI division, marketing aggressively to drive adoption of its AI app and launching new AI products to signal its ambition.

Tencent last year hired Yao Shunyu, a former researcher for ChatGPT maker OpenAI, to lead the company's AI infrastructure efforts, including the development of large language models. Then it joined domestic peers like Alibaba and ByteDance in offering incentives to attract users to their AI tools during the Lunar New Year break.

This month, after OpenClaw, the open-source AI assistant, became a hit in China's tech community, Tencent quickly released a series of OpenClaw-like AI agent tools to capitalize on the hype and integrate them in its ecosystem.

Tencent's bread-and-butter gaming business maintained solid growth in the three months ended December, with revenue from domestic games rising 15% and international games revenue jumping 32% as both evergreen games and newly launched titles showed strong momentum.

Last week, Apple lowered the commission it charges on digital sales in China to 25% from 30%, a move that bodes well for game developers such as Tencent.

WeChat and Weixin had a combined 1.418 billion monthly active users at the end of December, up 2% from a year earlier.

Write to Sherry Qin at sherry.qin@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

March 18, 2026 05:12 ET (09:12 GMT)