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http://blogs.barrons.com/asiastocks/2015/01/23/tencent-can-pull-in-10-billion-yuan-annually-from-wechat-advertising/?mod=yahoobarrons&ru=yahooThe recent narrative about Tencent Holdings (0700.HK/TCEHY) is its advertising capabilities. Unlike Facebook (FB) or Twitter (TWTR), which make most of their money from advertising, gaming revenue is the big chunk at Tencent. For the nine months ending September, of the total 58 billion in sales, “value-added services,” or gaming and gaming-related sales, came up at 46 billion yuan. Tencent made only 5.7 billion yuan from online advertising.
Pacific Crest analyst Cheng Cheng just joined the new narrative. “We see the potential for upward of RMB10 billion in annual revenue for Tencent in Weixin advertising in the next 12 to 18 months,” wrote Cheng in a note published today. If he was right, this would be a substantial chunk. Wall Street analysts expect Tencent to make 98 billion in sales in 2014.
Tencent’s WeChat is a compelling advertising platform, wrote Cheng:
Due to the massive amounts of user time spent on Weixin (No. 1 app in China), massive user reach and unique user identification capabilities, we think Weixin will be an excellent platform for brand advertisers to reach their targeted audience with the correct frequency.
How did Cheng get the 10 billion yuan estimate? He looked at peers’ unit revenue and multiplied with WeChat’s number of monthly active users:
In exploring Weixin’s advertising opportunity, we believe comparing it to other social networks that have existing advertising revenue streams will be useful. Specifically, we are looking at Facebook, Twitter and Weibo. As of the most recent quarter, Facebook (Asia-Pacific users), Twitter (non-U.S. users) and Weibo have achieved advertising-based monetization of $1.18, $0.50 and $0.39 per MAU per quarter, respectively. If we apply those metrics to Weixin’s most recent MAU count and adjust for non-Chinese MAUs, we would get a quarterly revenue opportunity of between RMB972 million and RMB2.9 billion for Tencent.