China Social Media Giant Tencent is Now More Valuable Than Facebook

Move over, Facebook. There’s some serious competition in the social media world.

China’s Internet conglomerate Tencent Holdings overtook Facebook by size on Tuesday, with a market capitalization of $534.5 billion, compared to Facebook’s $519 billion, according to reports.

Tencent’s share price has surged following strong third quarter earnings, reported last week, with profits increasing nearly 70% in the quarter.

What’s Tencent?

Tencent is a tech conglomerate offering Internet services, an online advertising platform, and mobile games, among other things. It’s perhaps best-known, however, for its WeChat messaging service, which has close to 1 billion users who send about 38 billion messages each day, according to Reuters.

Market cap, is the total dollar value of a company’s shares. It’s often used to evaluate a company’s overall size

Tencent was founded by entrepreneur Ma Huateng in 1998. It has invested in numerous U.S. startups, including Snap and Tesla. Ma has an estimated net worth of $42 billion, according to CNN.

Earlier this month, Tencent caused a stir when it snapped up 12% of Snap after the U.S.-based messaging app company reported less than stellar earnings.

Tencent is now the fifth-largest publicly traded company in the world, according to Reuters. It ranks behind Apple, whose market capitalization of $873 billion makes it the most valuable company in the world, as well as Google parent company Alphabet, Microsoft, and Amazon.

[infogram id=”5624b090-27a2-48c8-b10f-fac165874e59″ prefix=”qmT” format=”interactive” title=”Tencent Chart”]

Largest publicly traded companies by market cap.

What is a market capitalization?

A market capitalization, or market cap, is the total dollar value of a company’s shares. It’s often used to evaluate a company’s overall size.

Market cap is determined using a simple calculation: You multiply the company’s share price by the number of shares available for sale. In this case, Tencent’s share price was about 440 Hong Kong dollars. It has about 1 billion shares outstanding.

That gives Tencent a market cap of roughly 4.17 trillion Hong Kong dollars, or $534.5 billion, according to CNBC. It’s the first Chinese company to reach the $500 billion market cap mark, beating out rival Alibaba, the Chinese eCommerce company.