Tencent Q1 profit surges to 2.95b yuan

Tencent Holdings Ltd, China's largest Internet company, posted a record quarterly profit of 2.95 billion yuan ($467 million) Wednesday, Bloomberg reported.

The company's first-quarter net income increased 2.8 percent from a year earlier, while revenue rose 52 percent to 9.65 billion yuan, Tencent said in a Hong Kong stock exchange filing.

In the first quarter of 2012, Tencent added 30.9 million active user accounts to QQ, China's most-popular instant-messaging service, bringing in a total of 751.9 million yuan.

Sales of Internet value-added services, including online games and QQ-related subscription fees, rose 41 percent to 7.38 billion yuan, Tencent said.

Online advertising sales jumped 92 percent to 540 million yuan last quarter, as Tencent attracted marketing spending on its search-engine and social-networking sites.

Tencent has 425 million registered user accounts on its microblog service, the company said Wednesday. On the same day, Tencent's major rival Sina Corp said it had 324 million microblog users at the end of March.