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在线翻译:
szdaily -> Business_Markets -> 
Tencent says payment subsidy war to continue
    2018-05-18  08:53    Shenzhen Daily

A SUBSIDY war in China’s mobile payment market between its two biggest tech firms Tencent Holdings and Alibaba is set to continue, Tencent’s president said after the firm reported a better-than-expected 61 percent jump in quarterly net profit.

Shenzhen-based Tencent said Wednesday net profit for the first quarter was 23.29 billion yuan (US$3.66 billion), beating the average analysts’ estimate of 17.5 billion yuan.

Strong mobile gaming revenue and 7.585 billion yuan in investment gains helped buoy its gross profit margin to 50.4 percent, the first sequential quarterly increase since the second quarter of 2015.

Tencent has stepped up its investment activities over the past year, not only making deals in areas like gaming, entertainment and frontier technology, but also in retail and e-commerce — traditionally viewed as rival Alibaba’s turf.

In a battle for the world’s largest mobile payment and retail market, Tencent has splashed out billions forging alliances with new partners like Carrefour and subsidizing merchants to lure them onto its payment-to-messenger super app WeChat.

Bernstein analysts estimate Tencent’s merchant subsidy will be around US$1 billion in 2018 while subsidies by Alibaba’s Ant Financial Services affiliate could be as high as US$2-US$4 billion.

WeChat had 1.04 billion users as of March and WeChat Pay is more popular than Alibaba’s Alipay in offline payment, though the latter is bigger in overall transaction volume.

“It is a matter of a fact that the competition is actually very heavy, there have been a lot of subsidies provided in the market by our market peers, and as a result we have to follow suit,” Tencent president Martin Lau said on an earnings call. (SD-Agencies)

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