Taiwan’s TSMC overtakes Tencent as Asia’s most valuable stock as China crackdown crushes its own tech champions
- Taiwanese chip maker has a market value of US$540 billion while Tuesday’s steep losses eroded the value of Tencent and its Chinese tech peers
- All eyes on Tencent’s interim earnings on Wednesday as investors look for clues on how it will overcome the regulatory squeeze
China’s unrelenting regulatory assault on internet-platform operators is crashing the market value of Tencent Holdings and its industry peers, allowing Taiwan’s biggest chip maker to leapfrog them as the most valuable company in Asia Pacific.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) has a market capitalisation equivalent to US$540 billion at the close of trading on Tuesday, following a 9.4 per cent rally in the stock this year. It outranked Tencent, which is worth US$535.8 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
Alibaba Group Holding, the owner of this newspaper, follows next with a value of US$479.4 billion. Liquor distiller Kweichow Moutai is the largest publicly traded company in the mainland market with an equivalent value of US$316.9 billion.
TSMC, as the world’s largest maker of chips for other companies is known, surpassed Tencent earlier this month, before the online gaming and WeChat operator rebounded from some relief rallies. They marked the first time the chip maker zoomed past Tencent since August 2013.
TSMC’s prospects are underpinned by strong demand amid a global shortage of chips that has been afflicting the car-manufacturing and other industries as the Covid-19 pandemic choked the global supply chain.
The odds are stacked against Tencent mounting a sustained rebound this time, after the stock and its peers took a heavy knock on Tuesday as Beijing tightened its grip on tech companies by drafting new anti-competition rules to ensure fair play.
The stock slumped by 4.1 per cent, taking the loss to 43 per cent from an all-time high on February 25 when it was on the cusp of becoming China’s first trillion-dollar company.
“We view this round of internet regulation as coordinated and likely to persist to at least end-2021,” said Meng Lei, a strategist at UBS in Shanghai. “Therefore we think we have not reached the bottom, and in our tactical sector allocations we maintain underweight on the internet sector.”
Tencent may yet redeem itself this week if it can shrug off the regulatory distraction and outperform market expectations with its interim results on Wednesday.
Its earnings probably increased 8.9 per cent from a year earlier to 32.8 billion yuan (US$5.1 billion), the slowest gain in a year, according to the estimate of analysts tracked by Bloomberg. They may have dropped 7.1 per cent based on the US accounting standards.
