Tencent's co founders were all from the same middle school. Tencent's first product was called OICQ which was based on Internet chat rooms. Got sued by AOL and Disney. Hence needed to resort to tencent.com for the product
Tencent's earlier approach was a copycat killer. Now, it has evolved into an ecosystem incubator & investor.
Battle on payments: Alipay went deep on QR codes whereas WeChat won digital payments via the Red Envelope growth hack, this is because the Tencent CEO used to manually give these out at Lunar New Year.
Alibaba was a platform for products. Meituan was a platform for services. Meituan founder had two previous startups. They poached senior Alibaba executive to become their COO.
Tencent WeChat copied the push to talk feature of TalkBox from Hong Kong. The app stalled because they prioritised sending quality over data usage. Both used a lazy sending feature.
Didi got funding from Tencent and Kuaidi got money from Alibaba. When US money couldn't bail Didi out, Tencent pumped more money in & drove traffic from WeChat + offered discount via WeChat Pay (after success of Red Envelope tradition)
Tencent bought 94% of Riot Games for $400M but only took 2 out of 5 board seats. Then brought League of Legends into China.
Tencent also bought 40% of Epic Games - Unreal Engine and Fornite creator, for $330M
Krafton, creator of PUBG, also got money from Tencent
Honor of Kings - title from Tencent's game studio for mobile gaming. It was a MOBA
Also bought 94% of Supercell which made Clash of Clans.
Tencent Music Services - got local copyrights for songs, forced NetEase and Alibaba to pay sub royalty. Did a share swap with Spotify for license sharing.
Tencent music services has a biz model different from Spotify, has queue jump access z early access, one time album purchase features.
#China