Tencent restructures with eye on industrial internet as gaming business slows

Tencent will also form a new technology committee that will create an internal platform for the sharing and collaboration of fundamental technologies within the company and apply them to different industries.

Tencent Holdings, which derives two-thirds of its revenue from online gaming and social media, reshuffled its business units this week in a bid to focus more on the industrial internet, as China seeks to upgrade its manufacturing amid a trade war with the world’s biggest economy.

The restructuring, the first in six years for the Shenzhen-based company, will see the creation of a new business group devoted to cloud and smart industries. Another new group will combine its social media, mobile internet and online media operations, a nod to the need for more strategic coordination with the emergence of competitors like ByteDance Technology, whose artificial intelligence-driven recommendation algorithms for news and short videos have captured market share and eyeballs away from Tencent’s own video and news platforms.