File photo/Zhang Jian (NBD)

Nov. 27 (NBD) -- Jeffrey Li, managing partner of Tencent Investment and vice president of Tencent Holdings, revealed the internet titan's latest investment record at a recent event in China.

Founded in 2008, Tencent Investment has set foot in gaming and entertainment, e-commerce, financial technology and other fields of investment. To date, almost 70 out of the entities it has invested have gone public, 7 more than the figure disclosed by president of Tencent Holdings Martin Lau at the Insight & Forecast Conference in February this year. Moreover, over 100 have grown into unicorns, according to Li. 

National Business Daily (NBD) noticed that Tencent Investment followed an aggressive investment strategy in 2015 with 107 investment deals made that year. From 2016 to the end of the third quarter of 2019, it took a prudent attitude. It is roughly estimated by Beijing-based industry research institute Zero2IPO Database that Tencent Investment pumped investment into 73 deals in 2016, 95 in 2017, 54 in 2018, and 37 as of the end of the third quarter of this year.

Most of its investments were made in the Internet sector, with 132 investment deals having been announced during these five years, according to the incomplete statistics. IT (information technology) is the second most attractive field for Tencent Investment wherein 65 deals were nailed, and the telecommunications and value-added service industry followed. Other fields favored include entertainment and media, biotech and healthcare, and finance.  

Of its investments, six deals received an investment of over 1 billion U.S. dollars in a single round, for example, the capital injection into local life service platform Meituan Dianping and Didi Chuxing's developer XiaoJu Technology.

Notably, the size of Tencent Investment's invested deals is roughly 1.5 times as big as that of its main Chinese rival Alibaba, which accomplished 248 deals during the period from 2015 to the third quarter of this year, and also dwarfs that of U.S. peers such as Facebook and Google.

With regard to the performance of its corporate venture capital, Alibaba's investment arm revealed in September that it had reaped a return of 18 billion U.S. dollars from its strategic investments worth 83 billion U.S. dollars since its inception in mid-2008. 

Email: lansuying@nbd.com.cn