Tencent crosses $500 billion market cap milestone

Tencent is an absolute behemoth in the gaming world, and yet it's a name that most consumers in the West are probably not familiar with. Today, as pointed out by Seeking Alpha, the company became the first Chinese tech firm to see its market cap cross $500 billion. To put that in perspective, that's more than the market caps of EA, Activision Blizzard, Ubisoft and Take-Two combined.

Tencent's financial standing is now more in line with tech giants in the world like Apple, Google's Alphabet, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon. The company has doubled its stock price in the last 12 months and this latest market cap news comes immediately after Tencent posted a third quarter with profits up nearly 70%.

The company's presence in the global games business seems to grow by the day, with major or minor stakes in numerous publishers and developers. Notably, Tencent has stakes in Supercell, Epic Games, Riot Games, Frontier Developments, and took part in Activision Blizzard's buyback from Vivendi, just to name a few of its interests. It also appears to be eyeing an acquisition of PUBG developer Bluehole.

Most recently, Tencent announced the purchase of a 12% stake in Snapchat. The company believes the mobile social platform can also be leveraged as a games platform. "The investment enables Tencent to explore cooperation opportunities with the company on mobile games publishing and newsfeed as well as to share its financial returns from the growth of its businesses and monetisation in the future," Tencent explained in a statement.