Tencent, Naspers shares leap higher

Tencent Holdings surged after delivering record profit that topped analyst estimates, calming investors who’d braced for a big hit to margins.

The stock climbed as much as 7.1% in Hong Kong, its biggest intraday gain in more than two years. Shares in its largest shareholder, JSE-listed Naspers, jumped 5.2% on Wednesday on the back of the strong results.

China’s largest social media and gaming company posted a faster than expected 61% jump in net income last quarter as growth on mobile bounced back, outstripping estimates by almost a third. But Thursday’s gain, while translating into a roughly US$30bn increase in market value, only helped Tencent recoup a slice of the more than $90bn lost since peaking in January.

Its latest results soothed fears that outsized spending would hammer profitability. The owner of the giant WeChat messaging platform opened its wallet to sustain growth as PC gaming slows, investing in cloud computing, entertainment and physical retail to lock horns with Alibaba Group. It’s also secured Chinese distribution rights to some of the world’s hottest games, including PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, adapting it into mobile titles to draw in smartphone users.

The gross profit margin in the quarter was more than 50%, higher than the 47% expected by analysts.

“Analysts were expecting a drag on margins because of increasing contribution from cloud and payments, but it looks like Tencent was pretty good at controlling costs,” said Julia Pan, a Shanghai-based analyst at UOB Kay Hian.

Tencent continues to draw the lion’s share of its business from gaming, while counting on advertising and finance via WeChat to drive future growth. WeChat had 1.04bn monthly active users — crossing the billion mark for the first time. But QQ, the older of its two social networks, saw users drop 6.4% to 805.5m at the end of the quarter.

Revenue from Value Added Services, which includes online games and messaging, rose 34% to 46.9bn yuan. The company has, however, been leery of barraging its users with ads — on Wednesday, it declared it had raised the maximum number of ads that customers see on WeChat Moments, a function similar to Facebook’s Newsfeed, to just two a day from one previously.

Costs surge

“The results were good even without the one-time gains, but the gains made it even better,” said Bhavtosh Vajpayee, a Hong Kong-based research analyst at Bernstein.

But overall costs surged 51%. Tencent executives have signalled a willingness to sacrifice margins in favour of longer-term growth in new businesses, though that would depend on growing and engaging a massive user base now primarily confined to China.

Profit was also helped by one-time gains of almost 7.6bn yuan from its investments in arenas like video and news.

“Mobile game growth was very strong, as the first quarter is usually a good season when users spend more time on their devices during the holidays,” said Benjamin Wu, a Shanghai-based analyst with Pacific Epoch.  — Reported by Lulu Yilun Chen, (c) 2018 Bloomberg LP