Tencent first-quarter net profit surges 61 percent, beats estimate

HONG KONG (Reuters) - Chinese social media and gaming giant Tencent Holdings reported on Wednesday a 61 percent rise in net profit for the first quarter of the year, beating estimates, thanks to strong mobile games revenue.

Asia's second-most valuable listed company said net profit for the quarter was 23.29 billion yuan ($3.66 billion), against an average estimate of 17.5 billion yuan from 11 analysts polled by Thomson Reuters. That represented a quarter-on-quarter rise of 12 percent.

Revenue rose 48 percent to 73.53 billion yuan, beating the 70.93 billion yuan average estimate of 14 analysts, according to Thomson Reuters data.

Smartphone games revenue, the largest revenue contributor, jumped 68 percent to 21.7 billion yuan while revenue from the more lucrative category of PC games was flat at 14.1 billion yuan.

User numbers of Tencent's popular WeChat messenger app reached 1.04 billion.

($1 = 6.3694 Chinese yuan renminbi)

(Reporting by Sijia Jiang; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman)