$134,600,000,000
Tencent
Net Worth
Started in (City)
Cayman Islands
Started in (Country)
United Kingdom
Incorporation Date
11th December, 1998
Bankruptcy Date
-
Founders
- Pony Ma
- Zhang Zhidong
- Xu Chenye
- Chen Yidan
- Zeng Liqing
About
Tencent Holdings Ltd., also known as Tencent, is a Chinese multinational technology conglomerate holding company. Founded in 1998, its subsidiaries globally market various Internet-related services and products, including in entertainment, artificial intelligence, and other technology. Its twin-skyscraper headquarters, Tencent Seafront Towers (also known as Tencent Binhai Mansion) are based in the Nanshan District of Shenzhen. Tencent is the world's largest video game vendor, as well as one of the most financially valuable companies. It is among the largest social media, venture capital, and investment corporations. Its services include social network, music, web portals, e-commerce, mobile games, internet services, payment systems, smartphones, and multiplayer online games. Offerings in China include the instant messengers Tencent QQ and WeChat, and one of the largest web portals, QQ.com. It also owns the majority of Global's music services (Tencent Music Entertainment), with more than 700 million active users and 120 million paying subscribers.
Beginning
Tencent was founded by Pony Ma, Zhang Zhidong, Xu Chenye, Chen Yidan and Zeng Liqing in November 1998 as Tencent Inc. The company’s first product came after Pony Ma participated in a presentation for ICQ, the world’s first instant messaging service, founded in 1996 by an Israeli company. The company launched OICQ in February of 1999, a copy of ICQ. The product gained tremendous attention and saw an exponential growth. It later changed its name to QQ after a lawsuit threat from ICQ. Tencent quickly acquired notoriety for creating cloned versions of western software and services. But QQ slowly gained popularity and provided Tencent a strong foothold in the Chinese market which the company then used to build an empire. A huge part of the revenue was earned from the sale of ’avatars’ which were cartoon characters that users can adopt while online. This feature attracted a large number of users who paid significant amounts to Tencent for the use of these avatars. The official mascot of Tencent was an adorable penguin named QQ who became very popular in China. Tencent’s active users increased to 30 million, 70% of China’s Unicom’s users sent their messages through QQ.
In 2000, Pony Ma turned to US investment firm IDC and Hong Kong’s Telecom carries Pacific Century CyberWorks who bought 40 percent of Tencent shares for $2.2 million. Moreover, 80% of the company’s revenue came from deals struck with Telecom operators who agreed to share the message fees. The management at Tencent realized that mobile was the future and by Maya 2000, they entered into the mobile domain with the launch of their Mobile QQ platform. This service allowed users to not just chat, but also play games and provide them with news, features that were not present in other platforms.
Road to Success
At the beginning of the new millennium, Tencent survived the collapse of the dot-com bubble in the US and it finally had their own products. In 2004, Tencent went public on the Hong Kong stock exchange. The same year Tencent Games was founded in 2003 to focus on online games. Tencent released its first game QQ Tang in 2004, which is based on its social media platform QQ. Around 2007/2008 it rapidly increased its offering by licensing games such as Dungeon Fighter Online, a side scrolling online beat em up game and CrossFire, were produced by South Korean game developers, Tencent now makes its own games. In September 2005, Tencent launched PaiPai, a customer to customer auction site. In addition to this, the company also launched Ten Pay, an online payment system which can support business to business, business to customer and customer to customer payments. The following year they launched a search engine Soso.com. In 2007, Tencent invested over 100 million in establishing Tencent Research Institute, which became China’s first research center dedicated to core Internet technologies. Tencent is committed to developing new innovations which provide value to people’s life. This is evident from the fact that 50 percent of Tencent’s staff belong to the R&D department. On 18th February, 2011, Tencent acquired a majority interest in Riot Games, developer of League of Legends, for about $230 million. Tencent already held 22.34% of the equity to Tencent Holdings. Tencent acquired minority stake Epic Games, developer of franchises like Fortnite, Unreal, Gears of War and Infinity Blade in June 2012. The company launched Weixin, a social media app. Now branded as WeChat, the app is one of the world’s most powerful social media apps, due to its wide range of functions and platforms.
Challenges
Many of Tencent's software and services are remarkably similar to those of competitors. The founder and chairman, Huateng "Pony" Ma, famously said, "[To] copy is not evil." A former CEO and president of SINA.com, Wang Zhidong, said, "Pony Ma is a notorious king of copying." Jack Ma of Alibaba Group stated, "The problem with Tencent is the lack of innovation; all of their products are copies.’’ For the occasion of the 19th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, Tencent released a mobile game titled "Clap for Xi Jinping: An Awesome Speech", in which players have 19 seconds to generate as many claps as possible for the party leader. In August 2019, it was reported that Tencent collaborated with the Publicity Department of the Chinese Communist Party and the People's Daily to develop "patriotic games. In December 2019, the Chinese government ordered Tencent to improve the firm's user data rules for its apps, which regulators regarded to be in violation of censorship rules. In January 2021, a proposed class action lawsuit was filed in California against Tencent, alleging user censorship and surveillance via WeChat.
Failures
In 2015, security testing firms AV-Comparatives, AV-TEST and Virus Bulletin jointly decided to remove Tencent from their software whitelists. The Tencent products supplied for testing were found to contain optimizations that made the software appear less exploitable when benchmarked but actually provided greater scope for delivering exploits. Additionally, software settings were detrimental to end-users protection if used. Qihoo was later also accused of cheating, while Tencent was accused of actively gaming the anti-malware tests. Tencent's WeChat platform has been accused of blocking TikTok videos and the censorship of politically sensitive content. In April 2018, Douyin sued Tencent and accused it of spreading false and damaging information on its WeChat platform, demanding RMB 1 million in compensation and an apology. In June 2018, Tencent filed a lawsuit against Toutiao and Douyin in a Beijing court, alleging they had repeatedly defamed Tencent with negative news and damaged its reputation, seeking a nominal sum of RMB 1 in compensation and a public apology. In response, Toutiao filed a complaint the following day against Tencent for allegedly unfair competition and asking for RMB 90 million in economic losses.
Achievements
- "Best Innovation Centre by Non-Financial Institution in China" at The Asian Banker: The Leadership Achievement Awards Dinner 2017
- Top 10 global brands - 2017
- Asia's 200 Best Over A Billion 2019
Subsidies
- Aurora Studio
- Funcom
- Tencent Music
- Tencent Pictures
- Iflix
CEOs
- Ma Huateng