BEIJING — Chinese tech giant Tencent reported better-than-expected quarterly revenue on Wednesday, helped by growth in ads within its growing “video accounts” business.

Overall revenue for the quarter ended Dec. 31 came in at 144.95 billion yuan ($21.07 billion), higher than the 143.89 billion yuan estimated by FactSet.

Tencent’s online advertising revenue overall grew by 15% to 24.7 billion yuan, beating a FactSet estimate of 22.18 billion yuan — and growing for the first time since the second quarter of 2021. The company said most ad spend came from e-commerce companies, fast-moving consumer goods and games.

Video accounts sit within the WeChat messaging and social media app and are a way for individuals and businesses to share short videos and livestreams on the platform. Average monthly users of WeChat in China and overseas rose by 3.5% from a year ago 1.31 billion accounts in the fourth quarter.

“This advertising unit allowed them to unlock revenue coming from e-commerce, which has done pretty well,” James Lee, U.S. and China internet analyst at Mizuho Securities, said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box Asia.” He has a neutral rating on Tencent and a price target of 400 Hong Kong dollars.

Shares of Tencent in Hong Kong were trading 5% higher on Thursday, at HK$366.40.

WeChat also has mini-programs that allow users to buy products from merchants within the app. Tencent said user time spent on mini-programs roughly doubled in the fourth quarter to also exceed that spent on Moments — generating “several trillions” yuan of gross merchandise value last year.

GMV measures total sales value over a certain period of time.

That level of GMV makes Tencent “one of the largest e-commerce platforms” that the company is starting to monetize, Lee said. “I think that has a very good potential going forward.”

Tencent did not disclose exact GMV figures. It was unclear how the numbers compared to Alibaba, which generated 540.3 billion yuan in GMV during its annual shopping festival in November 2021, the latest figures available.

Advertising expenditure is often an indicator on economic sentiment.

Companies selling lower priced goods are “seeing a broad-based recovery already,” Tencent Chief Strategy Officer James Mitchell said on an earnings call. “For companies that sell higher-ticket priced items, it varies category-by-category.”

He said those merchants and advertisers generally expect consumption to pick up later this year. Many video account viewers don’t use existing short-video apps such as Kuaishou or ByteDance’s Douyin, Mitchell said.

However, ads still account for less than one-fifth of Tencent’s overall revenue — which barely grew in the fourth quarter and fell for all of 2022 as Covid controls dragged down economic growth.

“The foundation model is something we have been developing since last year,” Lau on the call with reporters. He did not comment on ChatGPT or Baidu‘s Ernie bot, which was launched last week.

“It’s much more important for us to do it right than to do it fast.”