Tag Archives: Tencent

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The Explosive Rise Of Chinese Social Media

Regular readers of Coffee Break may recall recently reading about the phenomenal growth of China’s Tencent and its mobile messaging app. It seems that emerging economy, China, continues to go from strength to strength…especially where the internet is concerned.

For both Chinese internet companies and users, these are undoubtedly good times. While the government continues an unprecedented crackdown on outspoken liberal bloggers, e-commerce sites are thriving with about 10 percent of China’s retail sales now conducted online. About 600 million people have internet access in China, with 450 million smartphones and tablets in regular use. None of the leading Chinese internet companies are state-controlled, and those listed overseas have a combined market capitalisation approaching $300 billion.

Sina Weibo is a Twitter-like site, with more than 500 million registered users. Even British Prime Minister David Cameron has signed up, albeit ahead of a planned diplomatic visit to China. It is popularly used as a news feed and as a way to follow celebrities, opinion-makers, and even government press offices commenting on the daily news. Meanwhile, popular musician and heartthrob Li Yundi also took to Weibo last week to introduce fans to his new girlfriend which at the time was the most-read post on the site!

With so many news junkies tuned into Weibo, traditional cost-per-click advertising and ads imported from e-commerce sites such as Taobao.com have high growth potential as an advertising-based business model. Tencent Weixin as we previously reported, also goes from strength to strength as it could potentially charge for subscriptions to online games, specialised news services, or further value-added services such as e-coupons to be used in online stores.

Predictions are looking rosy for players in the Chinese internet market as they continue to build significant global businesses of increasing value. It seems that monetising Chinese social media knows no bounds!

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Who Has 1 Billion Users And Is About To Overtake Facebook?

It’s not Twitter, Google+ or LinkedIn. It’s a company that most people in the West don’t know. That, however, is set to change, with the explosive growth of China’s Tencent and its mobile messaging app WeChat…Last week, Facebook, the current king of social networks, admitted that it’s losing teen users and that the overall growth in its monthly active users has slowed to 18% year-on-year. This isn’t helped by the fact that it and other Western social networks are banned in China. By contrast, Tencent recently announced that WeChat’s users have almost tripled from the 85 million of the year before. And Tencent’s reach unlike local Twitter-equivalent Sina Weibo and Facebook-equivalent RenRen is not just restricted to China. In just four months between May and September 2013, its overseas users have doubled from 50m to 100m. Tencent has managed to differentiate its product with some killer features that keep users coming back for more. WeChat has neatly fused together the open approach of social networks such as Twitter, where anyone can follow anybody, and more closed networks such as Facebook which rely on mutual friend connections. With a $101bn US market cap, Tencent joins Yahoo!, eBay and Amazon among the world’s most valuable internet companies. It is looking like Tencent will overtake Facebook, although partly because China’s population is bigger and partly because it has an unfair advantage over Western competitors blocked out of the Chinese market. This needs to change. Predictions for the next few years are that Tencent will build a significant global business of great value: with products and brands we’ll increasingly come to know, interact with – and maybe even love. That’s our ten cent’s worth!

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