Tencent, China’s social and entertainment giant

An online entertainment giant in China, Tencent operates the hugely popular all-purpose app WeChat -- and the hit game Arena of Valor. It also owns the companies behind Clash of Clans and League of Legends.

Reading Time:3 minutes

Why you can trust SCMP

Tencent, China’s social and entertainment giant

Karen Chiu

Published: 5:38pm, 2 Oct 2018Updated: 8:08am, 20 Sep 2019

This article originally appeared on ABACUS

Right now, there are just a handful of tech companies in the world worth more than US$500 billion. The first Asian tech firm to join that exclusive club? Tencent, putting it among the ranks of Apple, Google and Facebook.

EARLY BIRD

The story of Tencent’s rise goes hand in hand with China’s dramatic internet boom that began in the 1990s: Between 1994 and 1998, the number of web users grew from only 1,600 to more than two million.

At that time, a young man named Pony Ma decided to pounce on the opportunity. He saw that, despite explosive growth, something was missing on the internet in China. While people in the rest of the world were communicating with each other through instant messaging services like AIM, there was nothing like that in his country.

Pony Ma, the tycoon behind China's social media and gaming giant Tencent

In 1998, Ma quit his job to found Tencent with a few friends. Their first product was the OICQ messenger, a near-replica of Israel’s ICQ -- later renamed QQ.

As expected, QQ spread rapidly in a massive country that was desperate to find an efficient way to connect its 1.3 billion people. As a pioneer, Tencent quickly fortified its dominance in online chat.

GOING MOBILE

Rather than sitting on its early success, a decade later Tencent saw another opening. China’s internet was going through a transformation again -- this time, from desktop to mobile. By 2010, more than half of China’s population was using cell phones -- and nearly 40% of those users were browsing the web with their handsets.

It was clear that Tencent had to evolve, and the answer came in the form of WeChat, an instant messaging app designed for mobile.