The “Penguin Empire” is showing no signs of slowing down
Tencent Penguin logo Image: Tencent |
Valued at over $100bn, Tencent is now the world’s third-largest internet company by market value, falling just behind Google and Amazon. QQ, its popular messaging service, now boasts some 800 million users globally while WeChat, a more integrated social messaging platform, has over 300 million.
Tencent has increased revenue by developing its “freemium” service business, which offers users various upgrades for a nominal cost but keeps the bulk of the offering for free.
Meanwhile, the company also expanded its offering under the QQ brand to include groups, cloud storage, emoticons, games, music streaming, download hubs, customised browsers and more. Pony Ma, the company’s ambitious CEO, set about dominating all facets of online life.
While the overwhelming majority of QQ users are non-paying the one percent who do generated the 43.9bn yuan ($7.2bn) in 2013. The company also introduced a QQ membership hierarchy system that also helped it prime customers to paying more.
Qzone is now China’s top social app by users, with over 211 million people taking advantage of the service, putting it head and shoulders above Baidu Tieba, which took second at 61.2 million users.
The online giant is now focused on developing its mobile strategy, which will include a wider range of apps and games. Although Tencent has developed almost 100 products for mobile use, it will be hard to replicate the success of its popular WeChat app, which garnered over 300 million users in less than two years.