Tencent’s latest financial data indicates that revenues derived from its fintech operations are fast approaching those sourced from mobile gaming.
Tencent’s revenues derived from fintech and cloud-computing services saw a YoY rise of 80% in 2018 to reach 77.969 billion yuan.
When cloud-related revenues of 9.1 billion yuan are deducted this leaves 68.9 billion yuan in revenue derived from Tencent’s fintech operations in 2018, fast catching up on the heels of mobile gaming’s 77.8 billion yuan in revenue.
Tencent said that fintech revenues rose on the back of commercial transaction processing fees from vendors, fees from users for cash withdrawals and credit card repayments, as well as services fees from the sale of fintech products such as micro-loans and wealth management products sold via the Licaitong (理财通) platform.
Licaitong currently helps clients manage over 600 billion yuan in assets, and as of the end of 2018 had around 100 million users.
“Weili” loans (微粒贷) or “particle loans” are the mainstay business of Tencent-backed online lender WeBank, whose operating revenues and net profits for the first three quarter of 2018 were 7 billion yuan and 1.77 billion yuan respectively, both of which were ahead of the full year figures for the preceding year.
As of the end of 2017 WeBank had issued 870 billion yuan in weili loans, with an outstanding loan balance of over 100 billion yuan.
WeBank operating revenues for 2017 were 6.748 billion yuan, for YoY growth of 175.50%, while net profits were 1.448 billion yuan, for YoY growth of 261.1%.
