The rise and hubris of a Chinese tech giant: Tencent -by Author Lulu Chen

Behind the great firewall of China, there is a parallel universe. There's a Baidu instead of Google, a Weibo rather than Twitter and Alibaba instead of Amazon. Lulu Chen narrates the story of Tencent; China's first tech company that was valued over $500bn in only a decade.

Lulu Chen's book "Influence Empire: The Story of Tecent and China's Tech Ambition" takes a detailed look at the Chinese digital giant's birth, its rise, and market battles. Tencent may not be so popular but is a majority stakeholder in Spotify, Tesla, Snapchat, Reddit, etc.

The author managed to interview the shy programmer once, and the revelations are well documented in this book along with the challenges faced by Tencent locally and globally over the past decade.

Tencent's first product was QQ modelled on ICQ, the Israeli chat service and moulded to the needs of the Chinese users. It aggressively fended off Microsoft's MSN and became a tech giant.

The reason for this iconic growth was Tencent's strategy of opening up it's platform, sharing traffic and tech know-how with companies it invested in. Tencent rapidly adapted to the shifting internet, and Chen ably charts its diversification over the years. 

Today, around a quarter of Tencent’s revenue comes from FinTech and business services. Roughly 1/5th comes from social network-driven entertainment like Tencent Video and WeChat Reader, and the last 1/5th comes from advertisement. 30% of its revenue still comes from gaming.

Tencent rose as China rose; by 2015 one unicorn was born every 3.8 days and 2 billionaires were created every week.

This growth is of course heavily bordered by state restrictions and regulations, we have witnessed how criticism of Chinese inefficiency has caused problems for Alibaba. No matter how big a company is, it cannot assume independence from China's political interest.

Pony Ma and Jack Ma are in a fierce rivalry over mobile payments, startups and new digital ventures. Today Tencent finds itself facing local pressures as Xi Jinping's mantra of "common prosperity" dislikes disorderly growth of capital.

As Tencent is looking to actively expand in the next decade, investing in a technological landscape of metaverse, decentralized Web3 while obeying an authoritarian regime poses a huge challenge.

Hope you enjoyed the article!