Tencent loses $20 billion in value after China attacks myopia with gaming curbs
Live MintHong Kong/Beijing: Tencent Holdings’ market value slumped by around $20 billion on Friday after China intensified a crackdown on online gaming citing rising levels of myopia, heightening regulatory risks for companies in the world’s biggest gaming market. The limits came around the same time as Tencent drew scrutiny from China’s communist party mouthpiece, the People’s Daily, which described “Honour of Kings” as poison and called for tighter regulatory controls of online games. More than 450 million of China’s 1.37 billion population suffer from myopia, with the condition increasingly affecting children, according to statistics announced at a National Health Commission conference in June. Founded in 1998, Tencent’s main business is video games but the company also runs China’s dominant social network, WeChat, with more than 1 billion users.