TENCENT has clarified a strategic shift in focus, committing to increased investment in AI. On March 18, Pony Ma, for the first time, publicly elaborated on the "Raising Shrimps" strategy. He believes that "Lobster" applications can implement AI across diverse scenarios, breaking through the limitations of traditional ChatBots. This approach helps leverage TENCENT's resource advantages and promotes synergy across its various business lines. He specifically noted that the decentralized philosophy long upheld by WeChat Mini Programs can be integrated into the future design of "Lobster" applications, addressing service providers' concerns about being "short-circuited" or marginalized. In the future, TENCENT's "Raising Shrimps" initiative will adopt a model combining centralized and decentralized approaches, which requires long-term consideration and patient refinement.

During the media conference call following the earnings release, TENCENT President Martin Lau revealed that the company invested 18 billion yuan in new AI products last year, and this investment will at least double in the current year. The steady growth of core businesses provides the foundation for this increased spending. The conference call systematically outlined the resilience framework of TENCENT's core businesses in the AI era, covering defensive elements such as network effects, regulatory barriers, and scarce resources.

The communication business, anchored by WeChat's 1.418 billion monthly active users, forms a powerful network effect and data moat. The gaming business builds barriers through the network effects of multiplayer competitions and its portfolio of evergreen game IPs; furthermore, AI currently struggles to create entirely new games centered on innovative gameplay. The fintech business benefits from strict regulation, channel barriers, and low commission rates, further solidifying user and merchant stickiness.

**Pony Ma's First Public Remarks on "Raising Shrimps": Can Integrate WeChat's Decentralized Philosophy** Pony Ma publicly shared his thoughts on "Raising Shrimps" for the first time. He believes "Lobster" applications allow AI to be implemented in various rich scenarios, unlike the past where it was heavily concentrated in ChatBots. This better utilizes TENCENT's resources, enables coordinated efforts across different divisions, and also provides inspiration for the WeChat agent currently under development. Ma mentioned that Mini Programs within the WeChat ecosystem have always been decentralized, and similar principles can be integrated into future "Lobster" applications. Service providers are particularly concerned about being bypassed or reduced to mere channels, so TENCENT must consider these needs in its ecosystem design. He stated that TENCENT's future "Raising Shrimps" effort will combine centralized and decentralized approaches. Agent partners desire their own traffic and entry points but do not want to be merely invoked. "This is a longer-term consideration; everyone needs to be a bit patient, as this won't emerge hastily."

**TENCENT President Martin Lau: AI Investment to at Least Double This Year; Yuanbao Spring Festival Installations Exceeded Expectations** Regarding TENCENT's future AI investments, President Martin Lau stated that the company invested 18 billion yuan in new AI products last year, and this will at least double in the current year. "Our core businesses are very solid and continue to grow, which can support increased investment." Concurrently, he mentioned that TENCENT's Yuanbao has accumulated a large user base through a successful cold start. The Spring Festival promotion aimed to boost user installations and served as a drill for future campaigns. The results met expectations, even exceeding initial installation targets. The next step involves improving retention and activity rates through iterative experience enhancements.

**Core Businesses Exhibit Strong Resilience in the AI Era** TENCENT President Martin Lau pointed out during the earnings call that the company's core businesses demonstrate strong resilience in the face of AI transformation. Firstly, communication and social services like WeChat and QQ are fundamentally about connecting people. This deep network effect, combined with the private nature of user data, creates a natural barrier not easily disrupted by AI. Simultaneously, the gaming business remains firmly rooted, especially multiplayer online competitive games, whose vitality is deeply embedded in real-time interaction between players and emotional investment in powerful IP. AI technology has not weakened this but has become a tool to aid in creating more high-quality, innovative content. This contributed to TENCENT's games business achieving a 22% year-on-year revenue increase in 2025, significantly outpacing the global gaming industry's 7% growth.

Furthermore, in the marketing services sector, TENCENT has significantly enhanced ad targeting precision and creative efficiency by deploying long-sequence AI models and generative AI tools. Its "AI Advertising Solution" helps advertisers achieve automated bidding and placement, thereby improving return on investment and attracting more budget allocation. This ultimately drove a 19% year-on-year increase in marketing services revenue for 2025, far exceeding the Chinese industry average of 14%.

**Deepening AI Strategy: From Empowerment to Native, Focusing on "Yuanbao" and Intelligent Agents** During the call, the Chief Strategy Officer detailed TENCENT's AI evolution path. He stated that after completing iterative optimization of foundational models (like the Hunyuan model), TENCENT's AI strategy is moving from "empowering existing businesses" to a critical stage of "creating new applications." At the foundational model level, the internally tested "Hunyuan 3.0" model represents a significant leap in capability over its predecessor, providing stronger intelligent support for upper-layer applications.

At the application layer, the Chief Strategy Officer specifically discussed the positioning and progress of the AI chat application "Yuanbao." He emphasized that AI chat applications are not meant to compete with all apps; their core competitor is actually search engines. Currently, "Yuanbao" has 18 million daily active users. TENCENT is rapidly iterating the product by integrating search functions, optimizing voice interaction, supporting multi-model calls, and exploring group chat scenarios to enhance user experience and stickiness. It is anticipated that with deeper integration of the "Hunyuan" model's capabilities, Yuanbao's usage and user engagement will further increase in the coming months.

Concurrently, TENCENT views AI agents as the next major opportunity. These agents can autonomously execute complex tasks, effectively boosting productivity for individuals and businesses. TENCENT has already launched a series of AI tools, including Word research, QQ collaboration, and Tencent Cloud Lighthouse, and plans to make them easily accessible via a skills store. Looking ahead, the Hunyuan model team and application teams will collaborate more closely to provide users with unique and powerful agent capabilities.

**Tencent Cloud: Strategic Transition Yields Results, Capital Expenditure Increases** Tencent Cloud was a focal point of the discussion. Senior management noted that after a phase of prioritizing revenue growth and benchmarking against industry peers in prior years, TENCENT proactively initiated a structural adjustment of its cloud business around 2022, shifting focus towards high-quality service rather than chasing high revenue and customized projects. After several quarters of effort, this transition is showing initial results. Now, benefiting from GPU computing demand, incremental opportunities brought by AI, and expansion in overseas markets, Tencent Cloud is entering an accelerated growth trajectory. The company stated it has secured a significantly increased volume of GPU capacity, laying a solid foundation for meeting future demand. TENCENT views the cloud business as another typical "TENCENT-style investment case."

**Hunyuan Strategic Positioning: Winning in a Multi-Model Ecosystem Through Scenarios and Ecosystem** In response to a pointed question about launching Hunyuan alongside other major models and avoiding dilution of its own foundational model's value, TENCENT's management provided deep insights into the AI ecosystem. They believe the future AI world will not be a winner-take-all monopoly but a diverse landscape with multiple coexisting models and specialized分工. Just as the evolution from PC internet to mobile internet spawned countless applications, the AI era will also move towards distribution and decentralization. Different models will excel in various domains like coding, long-text processing, and multimodality.

Within this landscape, TENCENT's core advantage lies not in monopolizing the model layer, but in its user reach spanning PC, mobile, and cloud, coupled with its deep coverage across diverse scenarios like social, gaming, and content. The Hunyuan model will be closely integrated with decentralized ecosystems like Mini Programs, enabling agents to autonomously perform complex tasks, thereby providing unique value to users. TENCENT believes that, leveraging its powerful ecosystem and application scenarios, Hunyuan can become one of the excellent models that users and enterprises choose based on cost-performance and capability needs.

**AI Application Layer Opportunity: Intelligent Agents to Catalyze a New Decentralized Ecosystem** When discussing the most competitive segment of the AI value chain, management expressed strong optimism for the application layer, particularly intelligent agents. They believe that while competition in large foundation models is intense, future opportunities will manifest more at the application level. The emergence of agent capabilities will catalyze a new decentralized ecosystem. In this ecosystem, every Mini Program and every application can gain self-evolution capabilities through agents. TENCENT believes it possesses inherent advantages in this area: it has centralized super-apps like WeChat as traffic entry points, while also operating China's most active decentralized ecosystem—the Mini Program platform. With the infusion of agent capabilities, Mini Program developers will be able to offer users more intelligent and proactive services, which will be one of TENCENT's most important value propositions in future AI competition.