Tencent Holdings' investment in over 800 tech companies in the past months is proof of its unrelenting efforts at being the best in the business.
Early Monday, the Chinese tech behemoth announced that it will push further with its overseas foray and in evolving business areas like "smart retail."
Tencent's investments in more than 800 companies include 70 listed entities, with more than 160 priced at over $1 billion, Tencent President Martin Lau disclosed during a conference last week.
The Chinese tech titan is popular for having stocks in companies like online retail site Pinduoduo, food delivery firm Meituan Dianping, and video game developers like Supercell and Riot Games.
But the $490 billion tech empire -- and the second-largest company in Asia in terms of market capitalization next to competitor Alibaba Group Holdings -- seemed to have kept a low profile among news reporters about its investment activities.
According to Lau, in a recent conference attended by some 500 Tencent-supported companies, Tencent's previous regular investment locations were generally focused on video games and science and technology.
However, Lau pointed out, with Tencent's development of the WeChat mini-app and payment platform, the company "will give more premium on smart retail and payment platforms in future."
Xiaomi-supported mobile unit Black Shark announced Monday that the company has teamed up with Tencent Games in an attempt to pursue both software and hardware advances in gaming.
Xiaomi said it strives to give a more immersive gaming platform for its customers and expects to see this collaboration succeed with the roll-out later in the year of the Black Shark 3 smartphone.
While Tencent has yet to provide details of its soon to launch gaming smartphone, rumors have it that the Black Shark 3 will feature a 2K resolution and run on 120Hz refresh rate.
Earlier it was reported that the newly designed Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 SOC would power the smartphone, with a 16GB of RAM for data storage. So far, the highest memory capacity that most smartphones offer today stands at 12GB.
Meanwhile, ByteDance Inc. is bracing for a major push into the mobile gaming area that Tencent Holdings has dominated for more than 10 years.
The world's most valuable startup has created an exclusive gaming arm to spearhead its entry into the highly-stacked gaming business, sources said.
In the last few quarters, ByteDance has slowly but surely acquired gaming studios and title distribution rights. It has embarked on a hiring spree and built a team of more than 1,000 software engineers and analysts as it collides with Tencent and the other big players in the market.
