Ten­cent Plans to In­vest USD$10 Bil­lion in Eu­rope in 2020

Chi­nese tech gi­ant Ten­cent has re­vealed plans to step up in­vest­ments in the Eu­ro­pean mar­ket in 2020, with an es­pe­cial fo­cus on Ger­many.

Li Shi­wei, pres­i­dent of Ten­cen­t’s cloud busi­ness, said in an in­ter­view with Ger­many’s Han­dels­blatt that the Shen­zhen-head­quar­tered tech gi­ant plans to in­vest USD$10 bil­lion in Eu­rope in 2020, one third of which will be di­rected to­wards Ger­many.

Ac­cord­ing to Li Ger­many is “the most im­por­tant mar­ket out­side of China” for Ten­cent, which has a part­ner­ship with BMW in China and has sit­u­ated its Eu­ro­pean head­quar­ters in Frank­furt.

Ten­cent hopes to dra­mat­i­cally in­crease staff num­bers at its Frank­furt of­fices from 20 at pre­sent, as well as win over a greater num­ber of Ger­man com­pa­nies as cus­tomers in fu­ture.

Ac­cord­ing to a re­cent re­port Ten­cent is the world’s sec­ond largest in­vestor in tech uni­corns af­ter Se­quoia Cap­i­tal.

2019 saw Ten­cent dial back its in­vest­ment deals sig­nif­i­cantly, with a 33% drop in deal num­bers com­pared to 2018, and a de­cline of more than half in the in­vest­ment sum from 72.7 bil­lion yuan in 2018 to 34.3 bil­lion yuan in 2019.