It’s hard to overstate WeChat’s importance to Tencent Holdings Ltd. It’s the means through which Tencent introduces a billion people to games and other online content, funneling trillions of dollars in annual payments to brands from Apple Inc. to Walmart Inc. WeChat’s reach underpinned Tencent’s $280 billion gain in market value since a March 18 Covid-19 trough -- equivalent to one Samsung Electronics Co. and the fifth biggest dollar-gain on the planet over that period. Trump single-handedly stopped that rally cold. The U.S. President signed an executive order last week to ban U.S. entities from dealing with WeChat -- along with TikTok, ByteDance Ltd.’s viral video platform -- in 45 days. Confusion and uncertainty reigned as investors grappled with the vague edict. Tencent shed $66 billion over two days before it partly bounced back.
Executives unfurling earnings Wednesday will seek to reassure the market it can withstand a White House campaign that’s already ensnared Huawei Technologies Co. and dozens of Chinese up-and-comers. A U.S. official clarified the sanction involves only the app and not its owner. But the sweeping language of Trump’s order -- which bars “transactions” with the Chinese company -- leaves the door open for the administration to extend it well beyond WeChat, dubbed Weixin locally. “The impact on valuation would be more severe if the implementation included banning all transactions of Chinese businesses of U.S. companies with Tencent as a whole, as this would also hurt Weixin, advertising in mainland China by U.S. affiliated firms, the international cloud business, the international gaming business, and so on,” Morningstar analyst Chelsey Tam wrote this week. source