Tencent leapfrogs Facebook to become world's fifth largest company

Tencent has racked up some impressive gains this week, becoming the first Chinese firm to be worth more than $500 billion and surpassing Facebook to be the world’s fifth-most valuable company, Reuters reports. Earnings for China’s biggest social network and gaming firm have surged on the popularity of its smartphone games led by titles such as Honour of Kings. Also driving earnings has been its messaging-to-payment superapp WeChat, which has amassed 980 million monthly active users, with 38 billion messages sent daily, while its Youtube equivalent, Tencent Video, has become the video streaming service with the largest paying subscriber base in China. That success has helped Tencent’s stock more than double this year, making it Asia’s most valuable company worth $522 billion on Tuesday and easily outpacing a 36% rise in the benchmark Hang Seng Index. That beat Facebook’s market value on Monday of $519 billion. Only Apple, worth about $873 billion, followed by Alphabet, Microsoft and Amazon are worth more.