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China’s Tencent sees opportunity in female Honor of Kings mobile gamers

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Tencent’s Honor of Kings mobile game drew a record 33,000 fans to watch a final competition in Beijing on Nov. 16, 2024.

CNBC | Evelyn Cheng

BEIJING — Chinese gaming giant Tencent is betting on a rise in female players worldwide for its mobile game Honor of Kings, which rolled out to the U.S. and other countries in June.

Already a hit in China, the game drew a record 33,000 fans to a Beijing stadium on Saturday to watch two teams compete for a $3 million grand prize.

Surprisingly, many in the crowd were young women, reflecting how interest in mobile games has broadened out from the stereotypical male player in the days of console and PC gaming.

Launched in China in November 2015, the game’s appeal lies in its easy learning curve and relatively short sessions of around 15 minutes. Anyone with a smartphone can play for free in real time, on the go.

“Honor of Kings became an important way for me to socialize,” said Tianyun Gao, according to CNBC’s translation of her spoken Mandarin. She started playing the game in 2017 as a sophomore in college and became a professional commentator for the game’s competitions a year later.

Gao, an English major from Shanghai, has moderated Honor of Kings’ competitions in two languages, including an international event held in Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, in August. She said her hope is to see esports become as mainstream as traditional sports, noting that one of her inspirations is a Chinese soccer commentator.

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Tencent ramped up its global expansion plans for Honor of Kings this year, with its subsidiary, Level Infinite, in February announcing a $15 million investment in developing the game’s tournament worldwide.

An international version of the game has been available since 2016 under different names such as Arena of Valor, but the latest global push for Honor of Kings began in 2022. The game didn’t reach the Middle East until earlier this year and only launched in the key markets of North America, Europe and Japan in June.

Less than a month later, the game topped 50 million downloads outside China, according to the company.

Overwhelmingly mobile-focused

Growth in gaming among women stems largely from their preference in playing on their smartphones, without having to invest in consoles and other technology.

“Nearly half of female players play only on mobile platforms so we have a huge addressable audience,” said Jackie Huang, head of the Honor of Kings global esports division within Tencent Games’ TiMi L1 Studio. “Women make up a significant part of our player base but we want to see this continue growing.”

He said that 45% of gamers globally are women, and that the gender composition of Honor of Kings’ users is “relatively balanced. “We strive to provide users, no matter how they identify, with [a] high quality gaming experience,” Huang said.

Gaming is Tencent’s biggest revenue driver, with international games accounting for around 28% of the its overall gaming business in the third quarter.

The company also owns Riot Games, a developer whose PC-based League of Legends has become one of the most popular names in global esports with its own annual competition. Honor of Kings, which claims 100 million players a day, uses a similar format with two teams of five players each.

Such multiplayer games are the second-most popular category for female gamers, behind puzzles, said Xiaofeng Zeng, China-based vice president at gaming research firm Niko Partners. His analysis found that 95% of women prefer mobile games.

If Honor of Kings can hold first place in China, and achieve that position overseas, then Tencent can generate half its revenue from international markets, Zeng said. He said the game’s top overseas markets by revenue are the U.S., India, Malaysia, and Indonesia.

And in the key market of Southeast Asia, Zeng said that due to a low base, female players are growing two to three times more quickly than male gamers. A newly branded Honor of Kings global championship was held last month in Jakarta, Indonesia’s capital, with Malaysian team Black Shrew Esports winning the $300,000 first prize.

Early stages

For now, no matter how popular Honor of Kings may be among women, the competitions remain dominated by men. The two teams competing in Beijing on Saturday consisted only of male players.

Huang pointed out that the global championship this year featured a female player from France’s Team Vitality, which is also managed and coached by women.

He attributed the Honor of King’s popularity among women to the game’s playable characters that are also female. Many of the figures, each with different powers, are based on Chinese historical or mythological figures.

In 2021, organizers of the Honor of Kings competition in China also launched a tournament for female players. This year’s womens finals are set to take place in December, with a prize of around $41,000 for the winning team.

“The pandemic was a large accelerator of females into the games space and we have continued to see increased engagement from female gamers,” said Chirag Ambwani, SVP, gaming and entertainment, at SensorTower, which focuses on mobile games.

Reasons include specialized and easy to access content, he said, adding that gaming participation grew overall.

As for Honor of Kings’ global expansion, Ambwani said SensorTower research showed “healthy growth,” with average revenue of more than $5 per user in the U.S. and Canada.

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DeepSeek AI excitement spills over to Hong Kong’s IPO market

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The Exchange Square Complex, which houses the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, on Feb. 26, 2025.

Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images

BEIJING — Chinese companies are jumping at a window of opportunity to go public in Hong Kong as global investors start to return to the region, following the news of DeepSeek’s artificial intelligence breakthrough in late January.

It’s a level of excitement that has not been felt for more than three years, despite the overhang of U.S. trade tensions. Initial public offerings are a lucrative way for early investors in startups to exit and reap a return.

“Everyone is working so perfectly together. IPO candidates, the investor and the regulators,” said George Chan, global IPO leader at EY. “All these three parties are working so perfectly at this moment to actually cultivate a healthy Hong Kong IPO market.”

“The U.S. long-term fund has returned. It shows investors are getting more confident [about] China,” he said, adding that post-IPO performance has also been encouraging.

Chinese bubble tea giant Mixue went public on March 3 in a highly oversubscribed Hong Kong listing. And in a sign of more to come, Chinese battery giant Contemporary Amperex Technology (CATL) filed in February for what could be Hong Kong’s largest IPO since 2021, when short-video company Kuaishou listed.

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News of China-based DeepSeek’s claims to rival OpenAI’s ChatGPT in reasoning capabilities at a lower cost — despite U.S. restrictions on Chinese access to advanced chips for training AI models — hit global tech stocks in late January, while spurring a rally in China. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index surged to three-year highs.

Chinese President Xi Jinping also held a rare meeting with tech entrepreneurs in February, and Beijing has signaled greater support for the private sector, after taking a more restrictive stance in recent years.

Six initial public offerings in Hong Kong raised more than 1 billion Hong Kong dollars ($130 million) in the first quarter — a jump from just one listing of that size in the year-ago period — according to KPMG.

In all, the consultancy said, Hong Kong saw 15 IPOs in all of the first quarter which raised 17.7 billion HKD — the best start to a year since 2021.

There’s still a long way to go before recovering to that level. Hong Kong saw 32 IPOs in the first quarter of 2021 that raised a whopping 132.7 billion HKD, according to KPMG.

The Hong Kong stock exchange has adjusted its listing rules in the interim, including ones that support companies already listed in mainland China to offer shares in Hong Kong.

In addition to CATL, other companies listed in mainland China — Hengrui Pharmaceuticals, Mabwell, Haitian Flavoring and Food, Fortior Tech and Sanhua Intelligent Controls — are “actively seeking Hong Kong listings,” said Tiger Brokers, an underwriter of many Chinese companies’ IPOs in the U.S. and Hong Kong.

“Chinese regulators are encouraging companies to list in Hong Kong to broaden financing channels and support the outbound merger and acquisition needs of Chinese enterprises,” the firm said.

Still not out of the woods

Back in the summer of 2021, the fallout over Chinese ride-hailing company Didi’s IPO in the U.S. prompted both countries’ regulators to scrutinize what was then a wave of Chinese companies listing in New York.

The major issues have since been resolved and Beijing has clarified rules for Chinese companies wanting to list outside the mainland. But the Trump administration indicated in its “America First Investment Policy” that it could increase scrutiny on U.S. capital flowing to China, on top of heightened tariffs.

The U.S. and China have yet to indicate when their two leaders might meet in an attempt to forge a deal. A surge of interest in AI and tech are also not yet enough to speed up a recovery in China’s economy.

“At this point in time, all we can see is the good indicators,” EY’s Chan said. But “there could be one single incident happening which could pretty much reverse the trend.”

“Things tend to have a pattern,” he said. “If things can keep on for three months, four months, it will likely continue for the rest of the year.”

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Treasury Secretary Bessent says market woes are more about tech stock sell-off than Trump’s tariffs

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Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent speaks to reporters outside the West Wing after doing a television interview on the North Lawn of the White House on March 13, 2025 in Washington, DC. 

Andrew Harnik | Getty Images

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Wednesday the sell-off in the stock market is due more to a sharp pullback in the biggest technology stocks instead of the protectionist policies coming from the Trump administration.

“I’m trying to be Secretary of Treasury, not a market commentator. What I would point out is that especially the Nasdaq peaked on DeepSeek day so that’s a Mag 7 problem, not a MAGA problem,” Bessent said on Bloomberg TV Wednesday evening.

Bessent was referring to Chinese AI startup DeepSeek, whose new language models sparked a rout in U.S. technology stocks in late January. The emergence of DeepSeek’s highly competitive and potentially much cheaper models stoked doubts about the billions that the big U.S. tech companies are spending on AI.

The so-called Magnificent 7 stocks — Apple, Amazon, Tesla, Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta and Nvidia — started selling off drastically, pulling the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite into correction territory. The tech-heavy benchmark is down about 13% from its record high reached on December 16.

However, the secretary downplayed the impact from President Donald Trump’s steep tariffs, which caught many investors off guard and fueled fears of a re-acceleration in inflation, slower economic growth and even a recession. Many investors have blamed the tariff rollout for driving the S&P 500 briefly into correction territory from its record reached in late February. Wall Street defines a correction as a drop of 10% from a recent high.

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S&P 500, YTD

Trump signed an aggressive “reciprocal tariff” policy at the White House Wednesday evening, slapping duties of at least 10% and even higher for some countries. The actions sparked a huge sell-off in the stock market overnight, with the S&P 500 futures declining nearly 4% and the blue-chip Dow Jones Industrial Average shedding 1,100 points. The losses will likely but the S&P 500 back into correction territory in Thursday’s session.

“It’s going to be fine if we put the best economic conditions in place,” Bessent said in a separate interview on Fox Wednesday evening. “If you go back and look, the stock market actually peaked on the [DeepSeek] Chinese AI announcement. So a lot of what we have seen has been just an idiosyncratic tech sell-off.”

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Conservative cable channel Newsmax shares plunge more than 70% after a dizzying 2-day surge

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A Newsmax booth broadcasts as attendees try out the guns on display at the National Rifle Association (NRA) annual convention in Houston, Texas, U.S. May 29, 2022. 

Callaghan O’hare | Reuters

Shares of conservative news channel Newsmax plunged more than 70% on Wednesday as its meteoric rise as a new public company proved to be short-lived.

The stock tumbled a whopping 72% in afternoon trading, following a 2,230% surge in Newsmax’s first two days of trading after debuting on the New York Stock Exchange. At one point, the rally gave the company a market capitalization of nearly $30 billion — surpassing the market cap of legacy media companies like Warner Bros. Discovery and Fox Corp.

Newsmax was listed on the NYSE via a so-called Regulation A offering, instead of a traditional IPO. Such an offering allows small companies to raise capital without undergoing the full SEC registration process. The primary focus is to sell to retail investors, in this case It was sold to approximately 30,000 retail investors. 

The public offering indeed garnered the attention from retail traders, some of whom touted the stock as the “New GME” in online chatrooms. GME refers to the meme stock GameStop, which made Wall Street history in 2021 by its speculative trading boom.

Newsmax has a small “float,” or shares available for trading. Less than 6% of Newsmax shares, or 7.5 million shares out of a total of 128 million fully diluted shares, are available for public trading.

The conservative TV news outlet has seen its ratings rise with the election of President Donald Trump and other prominent Republicans — although it still falls behind the dominant Fox News. Overall, Newsmax ranks in the top 20 among cable network average viewership in both prime time and daytime, Nielsen said.

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