Editor’s note: This post about Tencent investments originally appeared in our members’ only weekly newsletter, accompanying Elliot Zaagman’s analysis of Tencent’s global investment strategy published here. Sign up and read it first.
Tencent has an interesting investment strategy. In every sector except gaming, they spread their bets, usually taking only a 20% stake. However, as we discovered, that strategy still has room for variation. In preparation for Elliott Zaagman’s analysis of their investment strategy, we collected, cleaned, and visualized the publicly available data on how the tech major deploys its money.
One pattern was very clear: in relatively mature markets (US and India) they prefer to make a lot of small bets at the early stage. In immature markets (Southeast Asia and Africa), they go with larger players at later stages.
Our hypothesis: mature markets have already been won so it makes more sense to invest in smaller, but potentially disruptive companies. In immature markets, where they have less expertise and the market is still rapidly developing, it makes more sense to invest in companies who have already won or are about to. No matter which market, however, Tencent only likes making acquisitions in the gaming space, where it still garners the biggest proportion of revenue.
The data present is incomplete, though. We only included investments with publicly available funding data. Even then, we still don’t have exact figures on how much Tencent invested, no matter if they were led or followed-on. In addition, we don’t include the value of acquisitions, mostly of gaming companies (for gaming acquisitions, PC Gamer has a helpful overview). Elliott’s piece, the data he gathered and that we present below, is just one way of interpreting the data. If you have other interpretations, we’d be glad to hear them.
—John Artman, Editor in Chief