Tencent taps into China's online literature market

Tencent Holdings Ltd, China's biggest Internet company, announced its plan on Tuesday to tap into the country's booming online literature market in a bid to boost its entertainment business.

In Beijing, the company released the strategy of Tencent Literature, a business department, which has three online literature platforms. Two are for original literature by online writers and the other will offer online versions of top-selling books.

Tencent also launched a mobile reading center, which is a new feature integrated in the company's Mobile QQ. The feature gives direct access to the company's 600 million users.

"An increasing number of young people use mobile devices to read and an increasing number of movies and television soap operas are adapted from online literature. It is very important for us to get involved in this sector," said Cheng Wu, vice-president of Tencent.

Cheng said literature is the upstream of the entertainment business, as a lot of blockbusters are based on both Internet and traditional literature. With improvement of the intellectual property rights environment in China, the value of literature will be much more appreciated, he said.

In an aim to create more value from the intellectual properties Tencent Literature owns, it teamed up with Tencent Video; Huayi Brothers Media Corp, one of China's leading movie producers; and two other companies to set up a foundation to turn good literature into movies and TV series.

Statistics from EnfoDesk, an Internet think-tank, showed that revenue from China's mobile reading market surged 90.7 percent year-on-year to 1.47 billion yuan ($240.2 million) in the second quarter of 2013. The number of active users increased 11.3 percent quarter-on-quarter to 434 million during the same period.