Tencent Holdings 2025 Q3 Earnings Core Insights: Growth Driven by Games and AI

Tencent’s Q3 2025 revenue increased by 15% year-over-year to 192.87 billion yuan, setting a new single-quarter record; non-IFRS operating profit rose by 18.44% year-over-year to 72.57 billion yuan, and net profit grew by 19% year-over-year to 63.13 billion yuan [2,5]. Gross margin increased by 3.28 percentage points to 56.4%, with all business segments seeing improvements—value-added services gross margin was 61.2%, and financial technology and enterprise services gross margin was 50.2% [2].

• Game Business
  : Total revenue reached 63.6 billion yuan, up 22.8% year-over-year and exceeding 60 billion yuan for the first time. Domestic games contributed 42.8 billion yuan (+15%), while overseas games contributed 20.8 billion yuan (+43%) [3,6]
• Advertising Business
  : Revenue was 36.2 billion yuan, up 21% year-over-year, with AI technology contributing about half of the growth. Tencent Ads AIM+ enhanced eCPM and marketing ROI [3,8]
• Financial Technology and Enterprise Services
  : Revenue was 58.2 billion yuan, up 10% year-over-year. Commercial payments and consumer loan services grew steadily, with significant contributions from WeChat Store technical service fees [5,10]
• Cloud Business
  : Growth slowed due to AI chip supply constraints; the company prioritized internal AI needs, and capital expenditure decreased by 32% quarter-over-quarter to 12.98 billion yuan [10]

R&D investment hit a record high of 22.82 billion yuan, up 28% year-over-year, mainly allocated to AI large models and algorithm development [3,6]. The company entered the “staff expansion and efficiency improvement” phase, with average monthly salary per employee reaching 93,900 yuan (+3,200 yuan) [2,9]

• Risks
  : Cloud business restricted by AI chip supply; global macroeconomic uncertainty [1,7]
• Opportunities
  : Sustained growth in AI-driven advertising and game businesses; commercialization of AI large model R&D results [3,6]