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Tencent loses over $43 billion in market value after China proposes new online gaming rules

Tencent lost about $43.5 billion in market value on Friday after China surprised financial markets with a fresh set of rules aimed at curbing excessive gaming and spending.

The draft guidelines from China’s National Press and Publication Administration sank the Hong Kong-listed shares of Tencent, NetEase and Bilibili — among the largest online gaming-related counters in the world’s biggest online gaming market.

“The most recent regulatory move on the online gaming industry is the last thing the market was hoping to hear out of Beijing,” Brian Tycangco, an analyst at Stansberry Research told CNBC.  

“While well intended, the move casts doubt on the viability of existing business models that mostly are built around incentive or rewards to attract users and boost loyalty,” he added.

Shenzhen-based Tencent, which owns WeChat and generated over a fifth of its third-quarter revenue from domestic online gaming, saw its shares tumble about 12.4% to close at HK$274, its lowest closing level since end-November 2022.

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Tencent Holdings

NetEase, 80% of whose third-quarter revenue came from domestic online gaming, plunged 24.6% to close at HK$122. Friday’s losses wiped out about 115.1 billion Hong Kong dollars ($14.7 billion) off NetEase’s market capitalization.

Bilibili, a social media site that derived 17.1% of its total third-quarter net revenue from Chinese domestic gaming, saw its shares slide 9.7% to close at HK$80.30, its lowest since November 2022 — shaving about 2.4 billion Hong Kong dollars ($307 million) off its market capitalization.

The Hang Seng Index closed down 1.7% on Friday ahead of a four-day holiday weekend, while the China Enterprises Index of the largest offshore mainland blue-chip names listed in Hong Kong ended down 2.3%.

“I’m confident we’ll get more clarity on these new rules in the coming days and weeks. But investors don’t want to wait around for the dust to settle. Better coordination between industry and regulators will benefit everyone in the future,” Tycangco said.

New guidelines, fresh setback

New draft guidelines released by China’s top gaming regulator require owners of online games to abstain from providing or condoning high-value or expensive transactions in virtual entities whether by auction or speculative activity, among other things.

Daily login rewards will also be banned, while recharging limits must be imposed with pop-up warnings issued to users who display “irrational consumption behavior,” the National Press and Publication Administration said.

“These new measures do not fundamentally alter the online gaming business model and operations,” Vigo Zhang, vice-president of Tencent Games, told CNBC. “They clarify the authorities’ support for the online gaming industry, providing instructive guidance encouraging the innovation of high quality games.”

Read more about China from CNBC Pro

These latest draft rules come at a time, given the broader China technology industry was just emerging from a broader crackdown that started in late 2020.

Just over a year ago, Tencent secured rights to five of the 45 foreign game licenses approved by the National Press and Publication Administration in the first batch of approvals since Beijing’s crackdown on the video-games sector that started in August 2021.

At the country’s annual legislative meetings in 2021, China President Xi Jinping blamed addiction to online gaming for rising myopia and the adverse psychological well-being of the country’s young.

China's evolving new tech guard shifts from Alibaba to ByteDance

Later that year, the National Press and Publication Administration proposed that children under 18 be should not allowed to play online games for more than three hours a week, limiting them to legal game time only between 8 p.m. and 9 p.m. on Fridays, weekends and public holidays starting in early September.

In August, the Cyberspace Administration of China proposed rules to limit the smartphone screen time of people under the age of 18 to a maximum of two hours per day.

— CNBC’s Lim Hui Jie and Arjun Kharpal contributed to this story.

Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated the milestone after the slide in Tencent’s share price.

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Tesla’s stock erases loss for the year, soaring 85% from April low

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Tesla's stock erases loss for the year, soaring 85% from April low

Tesla CEO Elon Musk attends the Saudi-U.S. Investment Forum, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, May 13, 2025.

Hamad I Mohammed | Reuters

Tesla’s shares have finally turned positive for the year.

After a dismal first quarter, which was the worst for the stock in any period since 2022, and a brutal start to April, following President Donald Trump’s announcement of sweeping new tariffs, Wall Street has again rallied around the electric vehicle maker.

The stock rose 3.6% on Monday to $410.26, topping its closing price of 2024 by over $6. It’s up 85% since bottoming for the year at $221.86 on April 4. A new filing revealed that CEO Elon Musk purchased about $1 billion worth of shares in the company through his family foundation.

It’s the second straight year Tesla has bounced back after a down first quarter. Last year, the shares fell 29% in the first three months before ending up 63% for 2024.

In recent weeks, analysts have praised the EV maker’s proposed pay plan for Musk, which could amount to a $1 trillion windfall for the world’s richest person over the next decade. The company has also gotten a boost from its new MegaBlocks battery energy storage systems that Tesla ships preassembled to businesses looking to lower their power costs or make greater use of electricity from renewable resources.

Even with the rebound, Tesla is the second-worst performer this year among tech’s megacaps, ahead of only Apple, which is down about 5% in 2025. Tesla is still in the midst of a multi-quarter sales slump due to an aging lineup of EVs and increased competition from lower-cost competitors in China, namely BYD.

Tesla has seen a consumer backlash, in part because of Musk’s political activities, including spending nearly $300 million to propel President Trump back to the White House and his work with the Trump administration to slash the federal workforce.

Tesla leadership has been working to shift investors’ attention to other topics such as robotaxis and humanoid robots.

However, the company has yet to deliver vehicles that are safe to use without a human onboard and ready to take control if needed. And while Musk is touting Tesla’s Optimus robots, which he says will be able to do everything from factory work to babysitting, a product is still a long way from hitting the market.

WATCH: Musk’s share purchase

Elon Musk's Tesla stock purchase is a great vote of confidence, says Sand Hill's Brenda Vingiello

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Alphabet becomes fourth company to reach $3 trillion market cap

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Alphabet becomes fourth company to reach  trillion market cap

Google CEO Sundar Pichai gestures to the crowd during Google’s annual I/O developers conference in Mountain View, California on May 20, 2025.

Camille Cohen | Afp | Getty Images

Alphabet has joined the $3 trillion club.

Shares of the search giant jumped more than 4% on Monday, pushing the company into territory occupied only by Nvidia, Microsoft and Apple.

The stock got a big lift in early September from an antitrust ruling by a judge, whose penalties came in lighter than shareholders feared. The U.S. Department of Justice wanted Google to be forced to divest its Chrome browser, and last year a district court ruled that the company held an illegal monopoly in search and related advertising.

But Judge Amit Mehta decided against the most severe consequences proposed by the DOJ, which sent shares soaring to a record. After the big rally, President Donald Trump congratulated the company and called it “a very good day.”

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Alphabet shares are now up more than 30% this year, compared to the 15% gain for the Nasdaq.

The $3 trillion milestone comes roughly 20 years after Google’s IPO and a little more than 10 years after the creation of Alphabet as a holding company, with Google its prime subsidiary.

CEO Sundar Pichai was named CEO of Alphabet in 2019, replacing co-founder Larry Page. Pichai’s latest challenge has been the surge of new competition due to the rise of artificial intelligence, which the company has had to manage through while also fending off an aggressive set of regulators in the U.S. and Europe.

The rise of Perplexity and OpenAI ended up helping Google land the recent favorable antitrust ruling. The company’s hopes of becoming a major AI player largely ride with Gemini, Google’s flagship suite of AI models.

WATCH: EU fines Google almost $3 billion

EU fines Google almost $3 billion over AdTech practices, reports say

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Bessent: TikTok deal ‘framework’ reached with China, Trump and Xi will finalize it Friday

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Bessent: TikTok deal 'framework' reached with China, Trump and Xi will finalize it Friday

Samuel Boivin | Nurphoto | Getty Images

The U.S. and China have reached a ‘framework’ deal for social media platform TikTok, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Monday.

“It’s between two private parties, but the commercial terms have been agreed upon,” he said from U.S.-China talks in Madrid.

Both President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping will meet Friday to discuss the terms. Trump also said in a Truth Social post Monday that a deal was reached “on a ‘certain’ company that young people in our Country very much wanted to save.”

Bessent indicated that the framework could pivot the platform to U.S.-controlled ownership.

TikTok did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The comments came during the latest round of trade discussions between the U.S. and China. Relations have soured between the two countries in recent months from Trump’s tariffs and other trade restrictions.

At the same time, TikTok parent company ByteDance faces a Sept. 17 deadline to divest the platform’s U.S. business or face being shut down in the country.

U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said Monday that the deadline may need to be pushed back to get the deal signed, but there won’t be ongoing extensions.

Read more CNBC tech news

Congress passed a law last year prohibiting app store operators like Apple and Google from distributing TikTok in the U.S. due to its “foreign adversary-controlled application” status.

But Trump postponed the shutdown in January, signing an executive order in January that gave ByteDance 75 more days to make a deal. Further extensions came by way of executive orders in April and in June.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said in July that TikTok would shutter for Americans if China doesn’t give the U.S. more autonomy over the popular short-form video app.

As for who controls the platform, Trump told Fox News in June that he had a group of “very wealthy people” ready to buy the app and could reveal their identities in two weeks. The reveal never came.

He has previously said he’d be open to Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison or Tesla CEO Elon Musk buying TikTok in the U.S. Artificial intelligence startup Perplexity has submitted a bid for an acquisition, as has businessman Frank McCourt’s Project Liberty internet advocacy group, CNBC reported in January.

Trump told CNBC in an interview last year that he believed the platform was a national security threat, although the White House started a TikTok account in August.

White House launches TikTok account

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