DObviously, on this holiday eve, the Chinese President, Xi Jinping, prefers to play the Fouettard fathers than the Saints Nicholas, the ancestor of Santa Claus. While the Hong Kong Stock Exchange was slowly falling asleep, lulled by the prospect of a long festive weekend, it was awakened by a clap of thunder from China.
Beijing announced new measures on Friday, December 22, to reduce young people’s addiction to video games. It was enough for the star of the stock market, Tencent, world number one in the sector, to collapse by almost 16% during the session, wiping out more than 50 billion dollars (45.4 billion euros). of market capitalization. No Christmas for Tencent.
The new regulations plan to limit in-app purchases of new accessories as well as rewards for extending playing time. Alert messages inviting you to stop any behavior “irrational” must appear regularly, without forgetting the essential banning of all content “endangering national unity”.
These restrictions bring back bad memories. In 2021, the government completely froze any development of this new “spiritual opium” and limited its use among young people to three hours per week.
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The government accuses video games of perverting youth, aggravating children’s myopia, youth unemployment and even contributing to the country’s decline in birth rates.
In December 2022, the authorities loosened the grip, authorizing the release of new games. Optimistic investors had detected the end of this offensive against one of China’s most powerful modern industries. Tencent is its finest flagship. It owns the most used messaging service in the country, WeChat, and interests in major players in the sector in the West, such as Epic Games in the United States or Ubisoft in France. A Beijing anger which also swept over, among others, the online commerce leader Alibaba. History of showing that in China politics holds the business world in its hands and at its service.
These political obstacles do not prevent the Chinese Internet world from having impressive resources. We learned on Thursday, December 21, from a Bloomberg report, that the company ByteDance, at the origin of TikTok and its Chinese equivalent, Douyin, forecast a turnover of $110 billion for 2023, exceeding for the first time King Tencent and his 85 billion dollars. The commercial monetization of its social network has achieved considerable success.
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