Quote:
Originally Posted by ChiliConCarnage
I'm not sure they'll see much success expanding their core business (Wechat/wepay & QQ) outside of China. As a social media it can't exist without sharing with the gov. That said, probably solid growth still just in China.
As far as games, it's fine. A lot via acquisition. Like Alibaba, they've been tossing money everywhere. Tesla, Snapchat, German flying cars, moon drones, bitauto. It's hard to keep track of
|
The world's best-performing large-cap stock this year?
It's not a FANG name, but rather Shenzhen-based Tencent Holdings (ticker: 0700.Hong Kong), which trades on the pink sheets in the U.S. ( TCEHY). With a market capitalization exceeding $529 billion,
Tencent is now the globe's fifth-largest listed company, bigger than Facebook (FB), and closing in on No. 4 Amazon.com (AMZN). And its stock still looks good.
Tencent is up 125% this year, 732% over the past five years, 4,323% over 10 years, and a split-adjusted 570-fold since its initial public offering in June 2004. A mere $1,764 investment on the day of its IPO would be worth $1 million today.
"It is a stock that everybody loves," says Chelsey Tam, an Internet analyst for Morningstar in Hong Kong. And a gift that keeps on giving. For the past two years, analysts have kept raising their price target, yet no sooner do they hike it, than investors chase it to well above their most optimistic targets. Tam's current target is 492 Hong Kong dollars (US$62.99), or 18% upside after Friday's comeback by the Chinese markets, which had swooned by 3% on Thursday.
How long can the world's most loved stock of the past decade keep surging? "As long as it can continue to deliver on earnings and widen its moat," Tam tells Barron's.
She expects Tencent's revenue to grow 60% this year and 53% next year, up from 47% last year. And she sees earnings rising more than 50.4% this year and nearly 40% in 2018. And, unlike Chinese counterparts Alibaba (BABA) and Baidu (BIDU) or global peers Alphabet (GOOGL), Facebook, and Amazon, Tencent pays a small dividend.
Think of Tencent as a sprawling tech conglomerate in the mold of Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A), which is 15% smaller. Tencent is the world's largest interactive gaming company, with titles like League of Legends. It operates China's biggest social network. Tencent Music is China's dominant music-streaming player. Tencent Video looks like YouTube and Netflix (NFLX) rolled into one. And WeChat messenger's billion users make it a tad bigger than Facebook's WhatsApp. Tencent is also boosting its advertising business, taking share from Baidu. Bhavtosh Vajpayee of Sanford C. Bernstein in Hong Kong estimates that Tencent, which had $1.1 billion in ad revenue last year, will have $7 billion by 2019.
The jewel in Tencent's crown is its growing financial-technology business, which includes the WeChat Pay payment system, wealth management products, and insurance and small-business lending operations. And, oh, it has a 5% stake in Tesla (TSLA), owns more than 12% of Snap (SNAP), and reportedly has considered buying a small piece of Twitter (TWTR).
Tencent wants to use Snapchat's platform to expand its gaming business in the developed world, says Morningstar's Tam. It is also interested in teaming up with Tesla to help in its own driverless-car ambitions in China.
WeChat Pay recently got a license to operate a payment and fintech business in Malaysia and wants to do so across the region. The WeChat messaging service is being rolled out aggressively in the United Kingdom, a prequel to expanding the ecosystem to payments and other services there.
Global investors are way underexposed to Tencent, says Catherine Tan, a portfolio manager with Excel Funds in Toronto. Excel, which bought Tencent stock years ago and has had a great ride, isn't about to sell. "Tencent has a solid competitive moat that is illustrative of the strong secular New China growth theme," says Tan, adding that it still has plenty of room to grow.
ASSIF SHAMEEN reports on Asian markets from Singapore.