Tencent was the first Asian firm to exceed US$500 billion in market capitalization.
Tencent passed the US$500 billion valuation level in November 2017 as its Hong Kong-listed shares climbed. The milestone made Tencent one of the world’s most valuable publicly traded companies and briefly placed it ahead of Facebook by market value.
Tencent’s business is unusually broad. It operates the WeChat and QQ platforms, runs major online games, provides digital payments, and holds investments in technology and entertainment companies. Those businesses helped investors view it as more than a single-product internet company.
The company was founded in Shenzhen in 1998 by Pony Ma and several co-founders. Tencent is sometimes confused with Alibaba because both are Chinese technology giants, but Alibaba is primarily associated with e-commerce and cloud computing.