Chinese gaming and social media group Tencent will open a new office in Singapore that will be its regional hub for Southeast Asia.
The new hub comes on the heels of a planned expansion by TikTok owner ByteDance and investment by Alibaba as firms look to deepen their exposure to fast-growing Southeast Asia – home to about 650 million people.
Benefiting from the political tensions that have rocked rival hub Hong Kong and growing distrust of China in the United States and other parts of the world, Singapore has also gained fresh appeal as a base for Chinese corporate operations.
Tencent is a multinational technology giant based out of Shenzhen, China. It is the owner of the country’s most prominent social media and messaging app, WeChat.
It is also the largest gaming company in the world. Tencent owns Riot Games (League of Legends and Valorant) and has majority stakes in Supercell and Epic Games (Fortnite). It also has minority stakes in Activision Blizzard (COD Mobile), Bluehole (PUBG Mobile), Ubisoft, and Voodoo, among others.