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IN BRIEF

Climbing high

Lukla Airport, Nepal

Chinese company Tencent has recently overtaken Facebook in value and has become the first Asian company to be valued at more than $500 billion in terms of market capitalisation. The chief executive of Tencent, Ma Huateng, is currently ranked as the ninth-richest person on the planet. Tencent is the owner of WeChat, a multi-functional app that has over 1 billion users per month. It is not only the social media platform of choice for the Chinese market, but it also incorporates a payment system.

Tencent has moved to buy up shares in other platforms such as Snapchat and Lyft (a rival to Uber) and the company is now one of the largest technical firms in the world, though the lack of encryption and concerns over data and privacy have meant that global adoption of WeChat has not occurred. However, a recent deal to move into the Malaysian market in 2021 for payment systems has boosted the share price. Users of WeChat are invariably complimentary about the functionality and use of the platform, but Western governments are more sceptical about it. However, due to it predominantly focusing on the Asian market, Tencent has not faced the level of scrutiny and inspection that its competitors Facebook, Google and Amazon have had to endure.

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Previous

Breakeven point

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Are businesses behaving more ethically?