Tencent sales top estimates on WeChat ad surge, resilient games

Tencent Holdings’s revenue beat estimates, buoyed by surging ad sales and resilient game spending while it works to catch up in artificial intelligence. Revenue for the three months ended June climbed to 204.8 billion RMB ($30.4 billion), surpassing the average analyst forecast of 202.8 billion RMB ($30.1 billion). Net income rose to 56.02 billion RMB ($4.7 billion). China’s Big Tech earnings hinge on AI returns The results kick off China’s Big Tech earnings season, when investors will seek details on their envisioned returns from a costly AI buildout. Tencent is showing early signs of traction through its Hunyuan foundation model and productivity agent WorkBuddy. It still has ground to make up on ByteDance and Alibaba Group Holding, but its online advertising has emerged as a fast-growing segment — boosted by WeChat’s reach — that’s giving the company a solid cash cushion to fund tech investments. Mirroring Silicon Valley peers, Chinese tech majors are confronting skepticism over the timeline for an AI payoff. Yet Tencent’s outlay remains among the most conservative: Alibaba has pledged more than $50 billion over three years toward AI infrastructure, whereas Tencent has refrained from setting a multiyear target, saying only that its investment in AI products will double this year. Still, Tencent’s capital expenditures in the March quarter reached 31.9 billion RMB, up 63% from the prior three months. Hunyuan Hy3 takes on DeepSeek and Kimi The Shenzhen-based company last month launched the official version of Hy3 — its latest model, a rebranding of the Hunyuan series — marking a major upgrade led by former OpenAI researcher Yao Shunyu. While the model faces intense pressure from open-weight Chinese rivals such as Moonshot AI’s Kimi, Tencent has hedged its bets by joining DeepSeek’s debut funding round and integrating the startup’s V4 across its ecosystem. WeChat evolves into an AI-first operating system Building on its strength in product design dating back to the mobile internet era, Tencent is now attempting to transform WeChat into an AI-first interface. The company is testing a native AI agent embedded within the super-app that can help users hail rides and summarize group messages — functioning as an operating system-level assistant akin to Apple’s Siri. Tencent’s WorkBuddy also gained rapid momentum as China’s most popular AI office tool, amassing 21 million monthly visits in June. In gaming, Tencent relies on several evergreen titles, such as “Honor of Kings,” “Peacekeeper Elite” and “Delta Force.” But it is taking a more disciplined approach to international expansion during a global video game downturn, cutting studio investments in Japan and trimming staff at the international outposts of flagship studios LightSpeed and TiMi. A $170 billion slide raises the stakes Tencent has shed roughly $170 billion of market value this year as global investors rotate out of traditional tech platforms and into hardware suppliers and pure-play AI developers. Rebuilding momentum will depend on proving that its AI investments can generate sustainable top-line growth rather than merely defending its existing ecosystem. “As chip supply improves in 2H26 and compute constraints ease, we expect Tencent to expand WeChat AI’s grey-scale testing to a broader user base,” Morgan Stanley analysts led by Gary Yu wrote in July. Tencent’s AI product portfolio “should continue to evolve alongside the HY LLM, reinforcing a virtuous cycle between model and application development.”

Tencent sales top estimates on WeChat ad surge, resilient games

How Bottega Veneta weaved China’s forever it bag

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Tencent sales top estimates on WeChat ad surge, resilient games

How Bottega Veneta weaved China’s forever it bag