Tencent Holdings, China's largest internet company by market value, will double the size of its investment fund to 10 billion yuan (HK$12 billion) to encourage technology developers to create more innovative applications on its platform.
Founder and chairman Pony Ma Huateng said the company's goal was to build the country's largest online platform that would be open to content and service providers in areas such as online games, social networking websites, new media, e-shopping and mobile games. 'There's nothing better than investing in this industry chain,' Ma said in Beijing yesterday.
He announced that Tencent had so far used about 2 billion yuan of the fund it set up early this year. It will inject an additional 5 billion yuan into it and boost the total to 10 billion yuan, even higher than the company's 8 billion yuan net profit last year.
Tencent, a rival of Sina, Baidu and Renren, has started to transform itself from sole reliance on in-house content and products to opening up its platform to attract external partners and expand user base.
It expects the number of active developers with regular income streams on the Tencent platform will reach 100,000, earning as much as 10 billion yuan annually. 'Some have expressed doubt on our sincerity in opening up our platform. We promise it'll be a total opening up, without any reservations,' Ma said.
The Shenzhen-based company, which dominates the mainland's online gaming industry and runs the largest online messaging platform, had around 200 million registered users for its Twitter-like microblog service at the end of March. It also has 128 million and 505 million monthly active user accounts on QQ Pengyou and Qzone, two other social networking platforms.