ABSTRACT
Tencent Holdings Limited is a company that was created in 1998 by Hua Teng Ma and Zhang Zhidong, specializing in mobile and Internet services, as well as online advertising. The Chinese giant was considered the ninth-largest company in market capitalization worldwide. In December 2017, it was estimated at US$ 277 billion. Banks, venture capital funds, and other institutional investors have obtained significant equity stakes in Tencent Holdings, although Naspers Ltd. was its largest shareholder in 2017. However, large investment funds and institutional shareholders are also large shareholders of Naspers itself. It is the worldwide trend of cross-participation between large companies and one of the characteristics of the financialization process. In the case of Tencent Holdings, the process is more recent, because the company is only twenty-three years old, but the main characteristics of financialization are present: dividend payments to shareholders, million-dollar compensation to executives, relatively low salaries to the employees, and the full commitment to maximizing shareholder value as the main mission of the company, as will be seen more broadly in this chapter.
