HONG KONG-LISTED Tencent Holdings rose nearly 3 percent Friday to HK$403.4 per share, making the Chinese Internet giant Asia’s largest company by market value.

The company’s fiscal report, released Wednesday, showed third-quarter revenue rocketed up 61 percent year on year to 65 billion yuan (US$9.8 billion).

The China Hi-Tech Fair (CHTF), which is China’s largest high-tech fair and held annually in Shenzhen, where Tencent is based, has also witnessed spectacular growth since its days as a young startup.

In 1999, when Asia had yet to step out of the shadows of its financial crisis, the Shenzhen city government transformed a lychee agricultural trade festival into the CHTF, hoping technical innovation would help restore the economy.

Tencent, just 1 year old at that time, rented a booth to display its messaging tool OICQ, known for its penguin icon and for being a copycat of the early instant messaging client ICQ.

“To attract an audience, we prepared 1,000 penguin-shaped pots as gifts, which turned out to be very popular at the fair,” said Chen Yidan, one of Tencent’s founders. “We later sold them for 5 or 10 yuan each, and the sales income offset the booth rental.”

In Tencent’s first round of investment in 2002, the company received US$2.2 million from two investors.

The “penguin” has grown into an Internet mammoth, with social networking, mobile payment, online music, games and live streaming services. It has also shifted from imitation to innovation.

Figures show that Tencent filed more than 1,000 international patent applications under the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) in 2013.

The company has also set up an artificial intelligence laboratory, eyeing success in the AI industry.

With its history of copying, keeping up and finally innovating, Tencent’s development mirrors that of China in general.

China has made innovative development the priority among its five developmental concepts. The report of the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China said innovation is the “first force” in driving development.

China has become the world’s second-largest economy after 30 years of reform and opening up, contributing more than 30 percent of global economic growth. As supply-side structural reform shifts the country’s growth pattern, scientific and technological innovation has taken on a larger role, and is leading to growth in many sectors.

At the ongoing 19th CHTF, nuclear giant China General Nuclear Power Group is displaying robots for nuclear plant operations, including one that is radiation resistant and can climb through narrow spaces to take high-definition photos.

He Yu, chairman of the group, said the domestically developed robots have broken foreign monopolies, which will help reduce the maintenance costs of nuclear power plants and increase the safety of plant operation.

At another pavilion, visitors tried on a “portable 3-D cinema” device, which has a headset plus augmented reality (AR) glasses.

With flexible sensors on the headset, users can play movies by simply touching and sliding the earphone.

The latest 4G version of the product won the CES 2018 prize in the United States earlier this month, and a former WiFi version has been sold in more than 20 countries and regions.

“People will be able to have completely different interactions with machines through flexible products, as sensors will no longer be limited to a specific shape,” said Liu Zihong, founder of the startup Royole.

China’s scientific and technological innovation is also being recognized more widely in academic circles.

Statistics released by the Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China last month show that papers by Chinese research fellows between 2007 and October 2017 have been cited 19.35 million times, an increase of 29.9 percent compared with data collected in 2016, placing China in second place globally after surpassing Britain and Germany.

China plans to become an innovative nation by 2020, a leader in innovation by 2030, and a world powerhouse in scientific and technological innovation by 2050, according to a three-step strategy for innovation-driven development released last May. (Xinhua)