China-based internet giant Tencent said it will boost investments in areas such as video, payment and artificial intelligence (AI), as it reported how previous investments boosted 2017 earnings.

In a media breifing, Tencent president Martin Lau hailed the year as a success for the company, noting many of its achievements during the period were “the result of investment we made years ago.”

“This demonstrates the importance of forward-looking investment. Therefore, for the year 2018, we are planning to step up our investment in a number of key areas,” he added.

These include Weixin Pay, cloud services, AI and smart retail. The company also wants to “aggressively” acquire video content and subsidise payment adoption, which it said could hurt margins in the short run.

Tencent posted a net profit of CNY21 billion ($3.3 billion) in Q4 2017, fuelled by mobile games and advertising. Its revenue grew 51 per cent year-over-year to CNY66.4 billion.

Its popular messaging app WeChat had more than 1 billion users. In 2017 WeChat introduced mini apps allowing users to access merchants’ services without having to download their apps from the major app stores.

There are now 580,000 of these mini-programmes, with more than 170 million daily active users as of January.