Chinese Internet Companies Report First-Ever Combined Revenue Decline

Unseen in almost a decade

A man walks past a sign for Tencent, the parent company of Chinese social media giant WeChat, outside the Tencent headquarters in Beijing on August 7, 2020. Greg Baker/AFP via Getty Images

China’s internet firms saw a decline in revenue last year, the first-ever drop in nearly ten years, according to Chinese Communist Party (CCP) data.

Data released on Jan. 31 by China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) showed that in 2022, total business revenues of Internet and related services firms, with annual operating revenues of over 20 million yuan ($3 million) in size, declined 1.1 percent from 2021 to 1.46 trillion yuan ($220 billion) and the revenue growth rate dropped by 10 percentage points.