Tencent

Tencent was founded in Shenzhen in 1998 by Ma Huateng (Pony Ma), Zhang Zhidong, Xu Chenye, Chen Yidan and Zeng Liqing; Ma still chairs the company and leads it as CEO. It has been listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange since 2004.

Its first product was the QQ instant messenger. Today Tencent runs Weixin and WeChat, which had about 1.44 billion combined monthly active users according to its results for the second quarter of 2026, alongside QQ, Tencent Video, Tencent Music, the Tencent Cloud platform and Weixin Pay. It is also one of the largest games companies in the world, with studios such as TiMi and LightSpeed, Riot Games as a subsidiary and a majority stake in Supercell.

According to the same report, the group had 115,927 employees at the end of June 2026. Most of its engineering is in Shenzhen and other cities in China, with offices across Asia-Pacific, the Americas, Europe and the Middle East. Tencent trains its own Hunyuan large models and publishes open-source projects such as the ncnn inference framework, the TARS microservice framework and Tencent Kona JDK on GitHub.