Speaking at the Mobile Internet sub-forum of the World Internet Conference, Pony Ma, chairperson and chief executive of Tencent, said the company would focus on being a connector to the internet: "Tencent’s advantage is in the communication and social platforms. Now the whole strategy is to return to the essence and be a connector to the internet, connecting not only people but also services and devices."
The following is the content of Pony Ma’s live speech.
It is a great honor to share with you some of my recent thoughts on this industry. Connectivity is very important for us, especially today’s topic of mobile Internet. From PC Internet to mobile Internet, two-way connection between people is becoming more and more important. I would like to take this opportunity to share with you some of my thoughts.
The birth of new features of the Internet
Tencent has been developing for 16 years, China’s Internet has been around for 18 years, and the global Internet is also in its early 20s, making it a very young industry.
Today’s Internet can be said to have grown vigorously in China. At the morning conference, many guests mentioned that China’s development has become increasingly rapid. From a global perspective, four of the top ten Internet companies are from China, including the latest listed Alibaba and JD.com. When they went public, they were among them, which is a very eye-catching achievement.
The Internet has undergone tremendous changes in the past three or four years. From the PC to the mobile Internet, we practitioners feel that the change has been so fast. When we see its inflection point, it is often half a year and a year, and it has suddenly passed. Many traffic, including Tencent, has undergone a rapid transformation in just two or three years, from the original 37 to 73, or even 28 to 82. This is a very big test for our industry, and new characteristics have emerged.
The most obvious feature is that the Internet industry was originally thought to be a new economy, but now everyone thinks it can be combined with various traditional industries. From the field of communications to retail, e-commerce, to entertainment, etc., a natural combination.
It turns out that there are no boundaries at all, such as finance, transportation, and many life services, such as clothing, food, housing, and transportation. Even taxi-hailing is linked to the mobile Internet, and a taxi-hailing company with a large market value has grown up.
In the past, Chinese and American Internet companies at home and abroad were often concentrated in a few giants. Now we see that many medium and large enterprises have begun to thrive in various fields, not limited to the original search, social networking, communications, and e-commerce. These traditional sectors, we see that each segment has grown into a relatively large industry leader. This is a big change I have seen.
Return to the essence of being a connector
For Tencent, we made a profit earlier in China. We made a profit in 2004. We went public on the main board in Hong Kong and had a three-year profit requirement. Because we operated online games very early, we had a lot of profits. We took some detours in the past, because we had profits, we found too many opportunities, and we went into many fields.
In the past six months and a year, we have undergone a lot of changes. We have found that the company’s best advantage is still concentrated on communication and social networking platforms, and our entire strategy has undergone great changes. We have partnered with Sohu for the search business and JD.com for the e-commerce business. We have returned to the most essential thing is to make connectors. Especially in the mobile Internet, we see new hope. It turns out that when you are on a PC, you will find it very difficult. Communication and social networking are only part of people’s lives, but in the mobile Internet, communication has great potential. Mobile phones are a natural communication tool, and a large number of opportunities to provide underlying services through communication and social networking have been born. This was not available in the PC era. Just open the browser in the PC era. But in the mobile Internet, we have people, contacts, and know his social network, in fact, a lot of bottom-level work can be done.
So we have a new repositioning, which is to be connectors. We hope to connect not only people, but also services and devices.
Our QQ present on all major platforms now has 820 million monthly active accounts, with an average daily message volume of 15 billion. On mobile phones, QQ has also made rapid progress. Active accounts in 542 million, with an average daily message volume of 10 billion. WeChat and WeChat are 468 million in one monthly active account. We feel that WeChat is a lot in first-tier cities. QQ and mobile QQ are very important platforms from the second, third and fourth lines to rural areas, and their growth is very fast. Get rid of the past PC era. Everyone only had two hours of online time. At that time, QQ went up as soon as they surfed the Internet, and it was turned off when they closed the network. Basically, QQ’s time is his total time. Now there is actually no concept of online, which will produce many new differences.
The second is service. In WeChat, we have introduced the system of public accounts and service accounts for the first time in an innovative way. In the past, it was hard to imagine that this could be done in the PC era. Through this service account, many services and merchants are connected, including his media, self-media people, and even the operator’s business hall. Banks can use this connection. There is no website, no website, and people can be easily connected. A lot of information and services can be forwarded and shared to one person, or a group, or even to all people in a fragmented manner. In social networks, it can be quickly reversed. This does not require a domain name, a website, or anything complicated at all. It can produce such a magical effect, and everyone circulates very quickly. This is a scenario we haven’t seen in the past few years. We feel like this is a prototype for a connected service, and there’s a lot more that could evolve.
The next step is to try to make connected devices. The device has just started. WeChat has a hardware platform and QQ IoT solutions, including in-car and other partners to launch car-connected solutions. These are early days. We feel that there are still many things that can be done, and it is impossible for us to do it alone. We must need partners to work together to realize such a great idea.
Open cooperation to cultivate an intellectual property ecosystem
For Tencent, the second principle is openness. We give a lot of non-core business to partners, and we cooperate with them. Our ecosystem is a more open ecosystem. We provide underlying communication, user authentication, or storage, or distribution platforms, or some transaction payment platforms based on this. We cooperate with partners in many vertical fields.
We see that more than three years ago, many companies proposed to open up, but looking back, Tencent still has some preliminary achievements in many businesses, including 5 million entrepreneurs, we roughly estimate that the valuation of the entire partner can exceed 200 billion.
Based on connectivity, based on openness, what do these partners mainly do? If it is to provide the simplest connection, it is pure pipeline, and I think its value-added services are not enough. For us, we have been in a field for the past 11 years, especially in the field of content, especially online games, we have rooted ourselves.
Facebook doesn’t do games, it does connections. Tencent is a little different. Tencent has gone halfway and has a large number of external developers, but it tries to develop games by itself, so that we can understand what this ecosystem is more suitable for. However, more of our content should not be developed by ourselves, but by our partners. This is a very complex system.
In the 18 years since the development of China’s Internet, it has gone from being completely disorderly and not paying attention to intellectual property rights to now paying more and more attention to intellectual property rights. Although the problem has not been completely solved yet, it has been obviously improving. Only in this way can the entire business model take shape. From video, music, animation, etc., will form an intellectual property ecosystem. This ecosystem cannot be done by only a few companies. It must be open and inclusive, with many partners participating, and a new ecosystem at multiple levels.
sound
In the past six months and a year, we have undergone great changes, cultivating our self-cultivation and returning to our essence.
We partner with Sohu for our search business and JD.com for our e-commerce business. We return to the essence of making connectors.
– Pony Ma, Chairperson and CEO of Tencent