China’s Tencent is spinning off parts of its empire in a move that will help incentivise the units’ management — but is unlikely to crystallise much value for the $380bn social media giant.
Tencent, best known for its massively popular WeChat app and mobile payments service, also owns a range of businesses designed to keep users in its ecosystem from the moment they wake up: paying for meals, chatting, booking taxis and gaming.
So far, it has largely kept its empire under one roof. But in the past month, it has filed plans to spin off online publisher China Literature on the Hong Kong bourse and Sogou, China’s second biggest search engine which it co-owns with Sohu, in the US.