Tencent Delivers Double-Digit Growth in Profit, Revenue

By Sherry Qin

Tencent Holdings reported double-digit growth on its top and bottom lines, extending its recent streak of earnings beats as the technology giant continued AI integration efforts and its core gaming business sustained strong momentum.

The WeChat operator, China's largest company by market capitalization, said Thursday that third-quarter net profit rose 19% from a year earlier to 63.13 billion yuan, equivalent to $8.88 billion. That beat the 56.89 billion yuan estimated by analysts in a FactSet poll.

The videogame and social-media company's revenue climbed 15% to 192.87 billion yuan, exceeding analysts' expectations of 189.15 billion yuan.

Tencent has invested heavily in artificial intelligence for years, developing its own large language model and leveraging AI to boost productivity and reduce costs across its various business segments. Its efforts are now paying off, with the company showing strong financial performance in recent quarters.

"Our strategic investments in AI are benefiting us in business areas such as ad targeting and game engagement, as well as in efficiency enhancement areas such as coding, and game and video production," the company said in its earnings release.

Shares of the tech company have risen more than 55% this year as trade tensions between the U.S. and China ease and the AI buzz fuels investors' appetite for tech stocks. Beijing's bid to reduce Chinese reliance on foreign technology has also set a positive policy backdrop after a yearslong regulatory crackdown on internet companies.

Tencent is Bernstein's top long-term pick in the internet sector; analysts at the U.S. brokerage said the market is likely undervaluing the company's potential to drive business improvement through AI.

"The state of internet penetration in China means the AI application layer has the potential to progress more quickly than in the rest of the world," Bernstein said in a note.

Tencent's bread-and-butter gaming business proved resilient in the third quarter, with revenue from domestic games rising 15% as both evergreen games and newly launched titles showed strong momentum.

Daily active user numbers of "Delta Force," a first-person shooter game, surpassed 30 million in September, one year after its launch. "Valorant Mobile" has also gained traction among players since its debut in August, with Morgan Stanley expecting the game to gross about 5 billion yuan to 6 billion yuan in the first year.

Marketing-services revenue continued to grow, rising 21% thanks to AI-powered advertising-technology upgrades and the continued growth of WeChat-embedded video accounts.

WeChat and Weixin had a combined 1.41 billion monthly active users at the end of September, up 2% from a year earlier.

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

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

November 13, 2025 04:15 ET (09:15 GMT)