Tencent, the Chinese tech giant, has scored its first big hit overseas, wooing 263m users to its PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds mobile game in the past year, according to data from app tracker Sensor Tower.

Tencent and rival Alibaba have grown to a combined market valuation of $930bn on the back of strong growth in China, where many of their foreign rivals such as Facebook and Google’s YouTube are blocked. However, they have struggled to gain much more than a toehold overseas.

At the same time, smaller Chinese tech companies have successfully expanded abroad. TikTok, the popular short video app owned by ByteDance, passed 1bn downloads worldwide last month, while several other Chinese start-ups are adopting business models wholly predicated on overseas markets.