China Big Tech shares take a beating ahead of latest quarterly earnings reports

Shares of China’s Big Tech companies continued to slump on Tuesday, ahead of their earnings report for the quarter ended March, as Beijing’s increased antitrust scrutiny added to investor concerns over high valuations and tightening monetary policy in the world’s second-largest economy.

Hong Kong-listed internet giants Meituan, Tencent Holdings and Alibaba Group Holding have taken a beating amid the recent retreat of Chinese hi-tech stocks.

Wang Xing, the co-founder and chief executive of Meituan, recently sparked a social media frenzy and a sell-off of the company’s shares, after posting a millennium-old Chinese poem seen as an unsubtle jab at the Chinese government. The company is already under investigation for possible breaches of China’s antitrust laws.

Shares of Tencent, which runs the world’s largest video gaming business by revenue and China’s biggest social media platform WeChat, declined 1.76 per cent on Tuesday to close at HK$584.50. That is far from the HK$775 share price Tencent reached in February, when the firm’s market value was on the cusp of reaching US$1 trillion for the first time.