Why Facebook should worry about Tencent

Tencent is an interesting company, but this article is complete bogus.<p><pre><code> Tencent has learnt how to penetrate overseas markets. In the online gaming industry, for instance, it has become a player by buying equity stakes in Riot Games for $400 million; Epic Games for $330 million; Activision Blizzard for $1.4 billion; </code></pre> So when tencent invests in a company, they are evidently &quot;penetrating overseas markets&quot;, but if Facebook acquires a company to gain international market share it is a sign of their inability to build something themselves.<p><pre><code> Tencent enjoys the advantages of a giant social network as well as a history of innovation. It has repeatedly fought off competitors including messaging apps such as AOL Instant Messenger, Confide, Glide, GroupMe, iMessages, Instagram Direct, Kik Messenger, Line, Popcorn, Tango, MessageMe, Snapchat, Shots, Skype, Twitter direct messages, Telegram, TigerText, Viber, which Japan’s Rakuten recently bought for $900 million, Whisper, Wut, and ooVoo. </code></pre> What is this even talking about? This seems like a random list of apps which are vaguely related to messaging. TigerText for instance is an internal messaging app for enterprises.<p>To me it seems like a rushed article that the author wrote because he had to meet some kind of quota.

As a South African I find the global indifference to Tencent quite strange. They are massive but mostly ignored (compared to e.g. Amazon which has a similar market cap). Tencent are aggressively expanding WeChat into Africa (big billboards everywhere!). They are also running a local development team in South Africa to customise the app for the local market.<p>Tencent were funded by Naspers, a South African company, so I think we&#x27;re much more aware of them than most other countries. I&#x27;ve spoken with Koos Bekker, the CEO of Naspers, about Tencent years ago. He said that they work much faster than any US tech company he&#x27;s every seen.

As a QQ user I&#x27;d like to note that it seems quite superior feature-wise to MSN messenger, Gtalk, Facebook messenger and Skype IM. You can for instance paste multiple images straight into the input box and send them just like text, and it also has an extremely quick and easy to use screen capture feature. Not to mention a reliable, indexed message history, offline file transfers (you send it when the other person is offline, and when they sign in they&#x27;ll be able to receive the file), and accurate notification whenever a message you send fails to be delivered.<p>Note however that I&#x27;m referring to the International Version; the mainland Chinese version is less appealing, full of advertisements, and hides some features behind paywalls.

Asia is a region which has proven its ability to innovate in the messaging space and the internet as a whole. I believe Rakuten and Alibaba (through their investment in Tango and Viber) along with Tencent are now ready to compete with US juggernauts like FB

I&#x27;m a native Chinese and started to use Tencent&#x27;s products 15 years ago. I&#x27;m using wechat as well since almost every Chinese I want to connect with has a wechat account.<p>Information based product, esp. with strong social context, is highly related with its user group. Even if every product in the narrowed domain is exactly the same. They evolve to different products later and may not a better fit for other user groups. And yes, the policy barrier set by the state is also a major reason to provide room to have some follower strategy products survive and grow strong. But market value is not a key indicator here. Money can not buy you anything, esp. in information industry, in which a lot of people know what a substitute product can do.<p>Also, if you want to worry about Tencent, just try their products to see how polished they really are yourself.<p>In case you are interested, Porter five forces analysis <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porter_five_forces_analysis" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Porter_five_forces_analysis</a> is a good framework and start to learn to have some idea of how to exam a market in a more logic way.

Tencent has been the elephant in the Global room for a long time. It sure took a long time to be recognised.<p>It is also the elephant in China, in a very nice way. Its success being based in Southern China seems testament to this. vs Baidu for example.

Google search for Tencent brings up this article. Not sure if I even found their real site.

If it&#x27;s so big how come I&#x27;ve never heard of it but have of Facebook? It must be that outside of China and Chinese users, it&#x27;s irrelevant. I honestly don&#x27;t think Facebook has anything to fear unless the whole world became Chinese somehow. Personally, I don&#x27;t want to use a service based in a communist country, NSA would be lesser of the two evils.