China’s Tencent Passes Wells Fargo To Become Tenth Most Valuable Company

Tencent, the Chinese tech giant, has passed Wells Fargo to become the world’s tenth most valuable public company.

According to Fortune, before Tencent, all of the top 10 most valuable public companies were American and did worldwide business, with the list including Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Berkshire Hathaway, Exxon Mobil, Johnson & Johnson, JPMorgan and Microsoft.

While Tencent doesn’t do much business outside of China, it does have a lock on social media in the country. Its stock climbed 43 percent in the past year and more than 20 percent so far in 2017 to pass Wells Fargo’s $275 billion market capitalization.

Tencent’s WeChat is the biggest social network in China, with 889 million monthly average users. Its online games have also boosted revenue, while the company has closed overseas acquisitions in Supercell and Riot Games.

But it’s the company’s mobile payment system that has really excited investors, surpassing 600 million monthly average users in December. Those users generated 600 million transactions a day and helped the company make more than $1.3 billion in revenue from payments last year. The result was Tencent passing Alibaba’s Alipay and Paypal to become the biggest online payment platform in the world.

And online payments are growing by double-digit rates in China, with JPMorgan estimating that Tencent and Alibaba together could pull in nearly $40 billion in revenue from payments in 2020.