The Chinese internet site Tencent benefited from extra internet traffic and gamers as a result of the corona crisis last quarter. Tencent has the largest online gaming empire in the world. It owns, or through Epic Games to a large extent, Fortnite, League of Legends and Call of Duty.
Tencent’s turnover increased by 29% in the last quarter to almost 115 billion yuan (14 billion euro) and that was a stronger growth than was expected. The Chinese giant made a profit of 33 billion yuan, also a lot more than was previously estimated.
Tencent is under attack by American president Trump, who has banned transactions with the Asia-popular app WeChat. According to Trump, WeChat “automatically holds vast amounts of information from its users”. According to him, this threatens to give the Chinese Communist Party access to personal information from Americans. The vaguely defined decree that Trump signed to ban WeChat by september could also put pressure on Tencent’s business relations with American companies.