China’s Tencent Passes Alibaba and Facebook in Pursuit of Amazon

With all the focus on Amazon in the west and Alibaba to the east, it’s perhaps overlooked that China’s Tencent is giving both a run for the money.

Tencent this week upstaged Alibaba to become the first Chinese technology company to reach a $500 billion market capitalization, with its $534.5 billion market cap beating Alibaba (and also Facebook) while nipping the heels of Amazon’s $542.7 billion valuation.

Founder Ma Huateng is worth about $42 billion, which is still less than half of the personal wealth of Amazon chairman and CEO Jeff Bezos, which today passed an astounding $100 billion based on Black Friday returns.

The owner of China’s most popular messaging service, WeChat, with nearly 1 billion users, Tencent’s portfolio includes gaming, social media, news and content.

Online and mobile games accounted for over $4 billion in revenue last quarter, bolstered by the 2016 acquisition of a majority stake in Finnish smartphone maker Supercell, creators of the “Clash of Clans” mobile game.

Tencent has also pushed beyond China’s borders by making investments across the U.S. and Asia, including Tesla and Snap, along with India’s Uber rival, Ola.

“We mainly attribute accelerating revenue growth to the continued monetization improvement across multiple key business segments, such as gaming, video, and payment services, and note that user growth is still strong,” Barclays said in a note to investors this week.

One of Tencent’s biggest growth areas is video, and it’s now rolling out a brand campaign to drive more awareness about its video offering. The theme is how people can enjoy great moments by watching videos anywhere—at home, on the road, in dormitories or offices—to turn “Turn Daily Life into Great Moments.”

“Every movie, drama and variety show helps us to perceive the beauty and fulfilling of life,” said Thirty Sun, VP Tencent and CEO of Tencent Penguin Pictures. “This is the core value of the video industry.”

The new campaign supports the “Enjoy Great Moments” tagline, which follows on the year-long “Passionate Moments Together,” which emphasized the youthful and energetic joy of movies.

Whatever they’re doing, it’s working. In September, Tencent Video announced that it had passed 43 million paying subscribers.

In July, Tencent Video gathered Chinese millennials and opinion leaders to create a series of brand events, including “Passionate Moment to Train,” and “Light the Earth with Passion,” that led to social conversation about “Passion Ran Culture,” an ad campaign around the Chinese word “ran,” which means “passion.”

The campaign reflects viewers’ reactions and emotional moments in their own lives with an emphasis on modern lifestyles that combine the virtual and the physical.

“Tencent Video has been increasing content investments, especially self-made contents and high-quality IPs, bringing happy elements and positive values to users,” stated Thirty Sun.

“In 2018, premium original content production, big IPs and superstars will be the key triangle of our drama series, whilst the key of original variety shows’ IP development is to establish industrial chains of young idol IP. Tencent Video endeavors to build high-quality content matrix of movies, cartoons, documentaries, music productions, etc.”

To further engage Gen Y and Gen Z consumers, Tencent has launched QQ X Project, a video competition that has been roaming the globe. Any Chinese citizen aged 18 and over can apply to the project by uploading their video entries onto QQ Kandian, QQ’s content distribution platform. Winning entries will be selected by public voting.

The QQ X project had stops in the Galapagos Islands, Namibia, Spain and Antarctica and received support from the Embassy of Ecuador in China, the Embassy of Namibia in China, the Chinese Arctic and Antarctic Administration, the Charles Darwin Research Institute and the World Wildlife Fund, among others.

Its environmental theme reflected each destination: “Species for the Galapagos Islands”, “Starry Sky for Namibia”, “Ocean for the South Pacific” and “Polar Regions for Antarctica.”
The underlying goal—to demonstrate its augmented reality, artificial intelligence, audio and video capabilities and NOW live streaming as tools for young people to explore the planet.

The post China’s Tencent Passes Alibaba and Facebook in Pursuit of Amazon appeared first on brandchannel:.