Different from the B2B electronic commerce mentioned
in the chapter 7, Tencent’s e-commerce is more focus on C2C and B2C. According
to the research, Chinese C2C e-commerce marketing share is far more than B2C,
which is different from American. However, the trend of changing from C2C to
B2C has begun. So does Tencent.
Paipai.com and QQ Mall focus on C2C e-commerce,
Buy.QQ.om focuses on B2C e-commerce. In March, 2013, Tencent announced that they
are going to merge its own brands QQ Mall and Buy.QQ.com to one and the only brand
open platform of Tencent B2B e-commerce. And Paipai .com will still exists in
the form of C2C. After merging, Tencent will cancel signing contract with those
sellers with bad service and trading records, and keep the high reputation
sellers, in order to offer customers the best products and services.
In addition, before 2013, China's most influential
shopping rebate site (fepai.com) and Tencent announced to be strategic alliances.
Tencent has 300 million users and over 90% of them are potential online
shopping customers. This group of customers is more likely to shop online, or
group shopping. But they also lack of rebate information. With the cooperation
between fepai.com and Tencent, Tencent users can buy products from fepai.com
without register a new account. They can log in with their QQ account and share
the products or rebates they get in QQ community. Tencent used the chance of
cooperation with fepai.com (B2C e-commerce); they can be familiar about the B2C
e-commerce. Therefore, in 2013, as I mentioned before, Tencent has internal
merge for its own brands, and make its products more mature.
Even though Tencent seems to be the NO.1 in online
world in so many aspects, like instant messenger, online games, Taobao.com is still
the boss in B2C or C2C e-commerce. As you can see from the chart, Taobao.com (blue
slice) occupies 71.6% market share, and Paipai.com only has 7.97% market share
(Beige slice).
Tencent has large amount of users, but compared to Taobao.com,
Paipai.com has less suppliers and sellers. So that the products and services
they offer and less than Taobao.com. I am the users of Tencent for more than
ten years, but I never shop on Paipai.com. I buy products on Taobao.com most of
the time. First of all, I think Taobao website has more organized and
attractive. They specify every product exactly in different category so that
buyers can easily find out the products they want. Then, Taobao will design
webpage depend on Chinese tradition holiday, in order to create a festive
atmosphere. Second, they have so many registered sellers in Taobao.com than
Paipai. Paipai is C2C commerce, but Taobao also has B2C e-commerce. That means
Taobao offers business companies or suppliers directly selling products to
customers. Therefore, the price of each product is more competitive that buyers
can get the cheapest price in Taobao.
Tencent has different products category for
different customers’ needs. First, Tencent has divides their products into the
following ways: communication, community exchange, casual games, action games,
online games, mobile and life style. Second, based on customer’s needs,
communication also can be divided into QQ, QQ mail, QQ software, QQ micro-blog,
QQ show, QQ membership etc. QQ zone, Friend, photo albums, QQ music, QQ live,
Podcasts are all included in the range of community exchange.
Tenccent marketing segmentation mostly reflects on
its games. Tencent Games is one of the biggest open platforms, as well as the
largest online game community in China. It
is divided into six market segments: action, shooting, MMO, sports, casual, online
games, in order to meet millions of Tencent users’ demands. The new games
Tencent recently released have different characteristics. In the action games,
Tencent released dark style “Sura” and comicize style “Swiftwind Blade”; Tencent
also develops the first third-person shooter online game "Gun Gods"
and Science-Fiction style game “Metro Conflict”. “The segmenting of games
market is conducive to business growth.” As one of the Tencent Game development
department employees said.
After the
long time marketing research of Tencent, they found that action online games
market is far from saturated. Different styles, different type of play action
game has great appeal to players. Therefore, not only Tencent continue has
their internal independent research and development, they also focus on the
open platform to attract different companies to released games in Tencent open
platform.
The Games mentioned above like “Sura” and Gun Gods”
are more suitable for the professional players. It needs time to finish one
level and continue to the next. At the same time, this games needs to buy “weapons”
in order to defeat the enemy. It is also a way Tencent earn the profit from, “weapons”
need money to buy. As a non-professional game player, I won’t spend thousands
of RMB to buy “weapons” that I can’t even touch. In addition, some action games
are too more violent for girls to play. Therefore, I usually play casual games.
Table Tennis, Tennis Games or QQ speed are the games I used to play. What I want
is to relax and having fun during playing games, but playing the acting games
make me feel pressure.
Many people including my Chinese classmate in
Business 104 class said that Tencent’s biggest failure is lack of innovation. Such
as its chatting tool, online games and the searching tool. I agree with it. If Tencent
still want to be the boss in the online world, it needs innovation. Sina.com is
one of the biggest competitors of Tencent. However, we need to admit that
Tencent is successful on its products, even though it copies other companies’
ideas.
Many netizens criticized Tencent plagiarism
practices. But the CEO of Tencent replies that innovation is not necessarily to
create an unprecedented product. Innovation can be improved existing products,
and offer a better experience to customers. That’s a way of success. Wechat
becomes a main product of Tencent, it also imitated the foreign voice application
KIKI. But no one can deny Wechat’s success. Wechat’s registers has over two
hundred million, the user average monthly growth is 10 million. The hottest
word in China is micro-innovation, it means incremental innovation. We can easily
find the micro-innovation from Apps update. For example, Wechat1.0, voice chat
is the basic feature; Wechat 2.0 then we can join a group chat; 3.0 we can add
a stranger for chatting; 4.0 Wechat offered an open platform; 4.3 version with
a public account that we can receive any messages sending from famous stars.
Wechat changes from a mere communication tool to a public mobileplatform.
Even though “Add Friends" is one of the core
function point of Wechat, the new function “Shake” is much more attractive. “Shake”
is a function you can search strangers by shaking your phone. It is like a
magical adventure. You never know who are you going to chat with and where he
or she from. I tried “Shake” today, and there were people from Australia,
Thailand, Spain, even Switzerland. No one ever expect that a function seems
stupid but can bring 100 million times of shaking per day.
Tencent manages its product by listening to
customers. Each time of product updates is not perfect; Tencent believes they
still can make it better. Listen to customer’s feedback is the most effective
way to improve their products. There is a website especially for customers’
feedback. Customers can call, chat online with Tencent’s employees or e-mail
them the problems they face. In addition, blog, micro-blog or Wechat are the
platforms customers would like to express their complaints to new products. So in
the development of a new product, Tenccent would establish a special group to
follow customer’s micro-blog or Wechat, listen and check how customers feel
about the new product and its functions. So that Tencent can know their problem and improve
it in a short time. The CEO of Tencent said that this method is stupid, but it
works.
I think Tencent’s competitive advantage reflect on
its users chain. Started from 1998, Tencent cumulative a large group of users. Many
people say Tencent QQ is low-end product, only students or immature people
would like to use, because QQ lack of innovation. However, I don’t agree with
this. Tencent was founded in 1998, and I became a QQ user in 2001, when I was a
Junior High school student. As I know, QQ was popular software that everyone in
the school knew and own an account. With so many years past, many of us has
graduated from college and working for different companies. But the main point
is that, we still using QQ as a way to contact each other.
It’s not out of fashion, or is not only for mature
people to use. In my QQ account, I can contact my friends in China, even though
I lost their phone numbers. One of my friends in China told me that the first
thing she back to the company is turn on the company and log in her QQ account.
Her daily contact with customers and suppliers is through using QQ. In
addition, many new Chinese friends I met here, they still using QQ. Some of
them have been here for more than 5 years, but the first choice and convenient
way to contact friends is using QQ. The huge relationship chain makes us stick
on QQ and depend on it.
More than that, Tencent used IM platform to communicate
with its customers effectively, in order to initiate company’s influence in the
online world. For example, in 2008, Olympic Games held in Beijing, China.
Chinese people were so excited for this year’s coming. On the same day Beijing
Olympic flame lit, Coca-Cola work together to Tencent QQ, and organized a
"Coca-Cola Olympic torch pass online activities. To most of the Chinese,
passing the Olympic torch seems impossible in the reality world. But the activity
Tencent held was a perfect way common people can join Olympic and show their
feeling to this great international activity. A torchbearer of QQ users can
send an invitation to their QQ friends. The torch has been passed down, and to
complete with a lit torch icon as marked besides the QQ account. In only 130
days, there were more than 62 million people joined the activity and passed the
torch.
Coca-Cola and Tencent launched this activity will
also increase their own brand awareness, and improved the reputation in a short
period of time. I think the most critical element for the successful of this
activity is interaction. Using the huge relationship chain of QQ users, Common
people can feel the passion by passing the torch to participate in the Olympic,
just like the real torchbearers. Furthermore, more and more people would know
more about Coca-Cola and Tencent. It was a great way to improve corporate image
and mass communicate with customers.
90% of Tencent users are around 19 to 35 years old. The
young generation is a group of customer eager to new products with passion and curious.
With the promotion of smartphones, more and more colleges student or young generation
have at least one smartphones. Instant messager with mobile version can satisfy
customers’ needs for communication. Because young people like to show their charm
and special to peer, Tencent develops a new version of mobile QQ especially aim
at young people.
First of all, new QQ version added with the feature
custom chart background. Customer can download any background Tencent provides
or you can use your own picture as a chart background. Any of your background
setting will not be visible for your friends or strangers, it protects
customers’ privacy. But if you would like to, you can share the same picture
background with your friends. Tencent released more and more features that
users can show their personality and charms by designing their own characteristic.
For example, the chart background, QQ skin, custom reply, QQ shows, QQ games
characters, etc.
At the same time, Tencent improves their products in
many ways. Tencent moves the features “add new friends” to the top of the “online
friend”. Compare to the PC version, Mobile QQ is easier for users to add new
friend. PC version were made the feature “add new friend” at the bottom of the
main page, it only with a magnifier besides it. New QQ customers would feel
more comfortable to use Mobile version, because it is simple and organized. In addition,
Tencent lighten the font color to make it soft and clear. Before that, the font
color of Tencent’s chatting tool is too dark. Users’ eyes may feel tired after
a long time watching the screen.
Another popular product is Wehat. Wechat is the
expansion of Tencent QQ. It is also a chatting tool. But what is different from
QQ is that, you can receive your friends’ messages any time even though you are
offline. More than that, you can create a Wechat account and add your QQ friends
as your Wechat friends. But if you don’t have a QQ account, you can add new
friend through the feature “search around” or “scan QR code”. Wechat is more
secure than QQ; Tencent released the feature of Official account that
especially for stars. Wechat only have mobile version, is quite safer than QQ. That’s
why most of the stars in China would like to use Wechat to contact with their
friends. Another reason stars use Wechat is that stars from HK and Taiwan they don’t
have QQ account, they use Facebook most of the time. However, mainland China blocked
Facebook. Therefore, Wechat is the perfect chatting tool they can use for communicating,
no matter they are in HK or Taiwan even mainland China.
Recently, more and more people focus on smart phones
and tablets. These products have features with large screen, latest technology
and portable that attracts people to buy. The sales of smartphones are far more
than PCs in 2013. Because the media pipeline changes, there are more than 800 million Tencent
instant messaging service active users. More than that, Tencent uses different online
platforms to attract advertising investors.
As I said before, most of the young generation
Chinese have at least one Tencent active account. Online game is one of the
entertainments for young generation. Tencent offers platform for games
developers to release their games. Therefore, there are so many different kinds
of games that would satisfy men and women’s needs. When I was a high school
student, I played QQ online games with my friends. Of course, I don’t like
violent games, we played casual games most of the time. And there is a program
called QQ shows that connects to our online games. We used QQ shows to dress up
the game characters. Tencent provides free dress for users. At first, my
friends and I would like to try the free one. But as time goes by, we would
like to pay for new ones. For the reason that Tencent only provides limited and
simple dresses. At that time, we thought QQ shows was a way can represent our
sense and personality, we arranged different dress on the game characters and
find the best one. And day by day, when we tired of the dress, we paid for
another one. Start from the beginning, Tencent offers the free but limited dress,
then kids addicted to it, they would like to pay more money on the best dress. This
also happens on when men buy their weapons in the games.
In addition, Tencent used Chinese New Year to have sweepstakes.
The more times you use Tencent products to send New Year wishes to your friends
and family, the luckiest you can win lucky money from Tencent. The New Year
promotion also include in online games. They have different packages for players
to choose, includes weapons packages, level update packages and diamond package.
Tencent members also can get 40% off.
Further, Tencent joint with Coca Cola have sweepstakes.
You can buy any Coca Cola products and there is a code inside. Customers can
log in the website and enter the sweepstakes code. You can be informed if you
won immediately. The prizes are the virtual packages offered by Tencent. Each QQ
account only can win 10 prized at most every day. And you can’t resent the
prize to friends. I am not interested in the prizes Tencent offers now. I like
sweepstakes, but as I grow up, I didn’t spend much time on games and QQ shows
any more. The prizes mean nothing for me. So even if I was in China, I have the
opportunity to join this activity, I won’t pay more attention on the
sweepstakes or turn on the computer to check if I won.
Basically, I never seen Tencent has any advertisement
shows on TV, newspaper or magazine. Tencent promotes its brand or products
through the following ways:
First, Tencent enhances brand image with large
world-wide activities. In 2010, Shanghai World Expo was a chance. Before 2009,
Tencent has a well strategy for World Expo. First of all, Teencent opened up
the World Expo channel. At the same time, they used QQ to launch online
activities to spread the Expo concept of environmental protection. Tencentaims
to let users cultivate a better understanding of and concerned about the Expo. After
a few months, Tencent has large amount of users joined the Expo activities. Basic
on this,Tencent used three major demands to attract
advertisers—Expo, users’ amount and users demands. In general, Tencent were in
a win-win situation. Not only users were attracted by Tencent’s Expo package
activities, but also Tencent earned the profit by ads.
Second, related to users. In the thanksgiving holiday
in 2012, Tencent released a brand commercial online. The video showed us the
theme of Love; it recorded the most common scenes in our daily life, including
a wife waiting for her husband from late night off-work; a father recorded for
his son’s growing up moments, the love of friend, sister, teacher and public. These
videos were very touching. It related to this holiday and the love we can find
in our daily life. Of course, in those video also implanted Tencent’s products,
in order to show users and non-users’ audiences that Tencent’s products are
related to people’s life. With using Tencent’s chatting tool or Qzone, we can
communicate with the one we loved easily and more convenient.
Third, star effect. For example, sometime when I watch
a star interview, different from the normal microphone, a star holding a mic
that attaches with a medium large brand logo—Tencent QQ with a signature Penguin.
Furthermore, Tencent would sponsor some
award ceremony, such as Chinese Music Award. Normally winner will award a
trophy, but at the same time, winner also receives a Tencent QQ stuffed animal.
Using the powerful effect of TV and stars, Tenccent quickly increased products
awareness and attract more investors and users.
Inditex is a Spanish company. Zara is one of the well-known
and oldest brands of Inditex. Inditex has eight brands; Zara and Zara Home are the
two most famous brands. Which are located in Deportivo La Coruna, Spain with
its headquarter-Inditex. Zara advocates fast fashion. They are basically imitating
the latest fashions, and then sell products at cheaper prices. Inditex's brand
- Zara, Zara Home, Bershka, Massimo Dutti, Oysho, Stradivarius, Pull & Bear
and Uterqüe –all follow Zara mode: beautiful high-end store sale fashionable
and decent workmanship, but low-priced products.
Zara open its 2200 retail stores in Euro and other
55 countries in a very short time. More than that, Zara opens up its online
store. Combine these two sale channels, Zara’s global turnover reached to 4.6
billion euros in 2004, better than the American brand GAP.
Different from the luxury brand like Gucci, Zara pursues
fast fashion. For example, Zara designs a fall/winter series, then each style
are issued only three or four dress, or shirt, or jacket to a store. There are
only small amount of stock left in each store. However, if customer needs
another size, store manager can apply for multiple shipments. All of the sales
have been perfectly well trained, they will record customer’s reaction to each
clothes. Listen and ask what customers need and their comments on Zara
products. Every day, store manager will hand in all the customer information to
headquarter. Headquarter then will send the information to their huge design
team. Designers will quickly develop a new design and send the draft to the
factory to produce the new products. Because of Zara’s fast fashion, the
products in the store update very quickly. You may not find a same dress in a
Zara store within 2 weeks. They want to make sure their products are unique but
low-priced.
When I lived in China, I never shopped in Zara. I knew
Zara is a famous brand. But as a student, I can’t afford it. More than that,
because of its noble decoration, I couldn’t even walk into the store. For me, Zara
is shopped by the rich with its high price. However, the first time I shopped
in Zara was 2 weeks ago. I was looking for a jacket for spring. I aimless
opened Zara’s online website and surprised at their low-priced. Therefore, I walked
into SOHO Zara after work. As usual, Zara uses beautiful decoration and bright
lights. What’s different from the Zara store in China is that, SOHO Zara’s décor
is more close to civilians. You can freely select your cloths without any
uncomfortable. There are some cloths designs for office working ladies, as well
as some young line products that suitable for college students. I was thinking Zara
can be my future shopping store. However, fitting room is one thing I want to
complain. I picked up 2 cloths and supposed to go to the fitting room and try
them. I stood in line for more than 20 minutes, but the line hardly moved a
walk. I have no idea what’s going on the line, or if there was any employee controlling
the line. I gave up waiting on line. Instead, I bought the jacket and tried it
at home. The best thing is that you can return it within 30 days after
purchasing.
All the business Tencent built up is basic on two platforms:
Tencent instant messages and internet service portal. Until Jun, 2005, Tencent
has initially completed the layout of online business model of industrial life.
Tencent established QQ, internet service portal, QQ games and mobile service
portal, which has built a huge online community. To meet the demand for
information transfer and knowledge acquisition, Tencent develops internet
service portal, QQ IM and QQ e-mail. To meet the demand of group communication and resource sharing, Tencent releases
Q-Zone and QQ group. In the aspects of personality showing and entertainment service,
Tencent has diversity of virtual imagine products, including QQ pet, QQ show,
QQ games, QQ music, QQ radio and QQ live TV. To meet the demand of online
trade, Tencent releases E-commerce Pai Pai online trade.
Most people have inertia
when they using internet service. People are lazy to find another service
provider if one website or one provider can satisfy all their needs. They will
focus on using the same service provider. Otherwise, searching a new provider
will cost more time and money. So in this way, Tencent has the inherent
advantages to open up e-commerce. Because Tencent has occupied 76% of the
instant messaging market share. That means they have the monopoly advantage on customer
channel.
At the same time, Tecent
released the special service for membership customers. Tencent designs a lot of
privileges special for advanced users, and strengthen the manifestation of
"Member" and the difference between ordinary users. Through this
exclusive glory service, Tencent attracts ordinary users to register as a membership.
Based on this model, Tencent continue to introduce new products and new levels
to continuously meet the membership user endless "desire". So that
membership users will stick on this product for period of time even though
membership has to pay money every month.
In addition, Tencent
opens platform for third-party applications to paid subscribers that cover almost
users of all ages. Age 14 to 25 years old is the largest group of paid
subscribers. It shows that the paid subscribers age are getting younger and younger.
Paying customers are mainly distributed in early high school and undergraduate;
mostly to high school and undergraduate education, accounting for 71.39%. This phenomenon
exists for two main reasons. First, except employees who work in the office,
student is a group spending the longest time on computer. They are also the
target customer of Tencent. According to the research,students and white-collar workers (including company
employees and management personnel) are the highest portion of Tencent users,
respectively 32% and 30%, accounting for 15% of the users of freelance. Second,
either membership fee or the games fee is cheap so that students can afford
every month. Furthermore, white-collar workers have a large portion on online
shopping or trade, because of their higher purchasing power and working environment.
The proportion of
male and female users is 59:41. Men will focus on playing several applications each
month, and male users are twice active than women. In the opposite, women
prefer to try different applications. In addition, men prefer to play the
game-type applications. Compared to men, women prefer to play non-active game,
such as tools, lifestyle applications basic on their personalities.
Tencent not only focus on WeChat‘s(instant massager
app) development in mainland China, they also has plans for the oversea market
in 2012. First, through theoperationofthecapital
level, Tencent bought the share of Korea KaKao Company, and own the
share of 13.54%. The investment amount is $ 63 million. In addition, Tencent
released a new App especially for the Indonesia market. It called Qute.
According to the market research, the users of Qute have over one million in
July, 2012. What’s interesting is that KaKao announced to offcially enter into
Indoesia market. Basic on the partnership between Tencent and KaKao, Qute and
KaKao, even Tencent will become competitors.
Except
for QQ and WeChat, Tencent Games is one of the main products of Tencent. In
2012, The
UP2012Tencentgameannualconference, Tencent
announced that they had obtained the global agent aoperating rights of Korean
action new game called Sura. Sura is not only the first online game Tencent
obtained as an international agent, it is also the first step Tencent plans for
its own company’s development for global stage. The road to oversea online game
industry has gradual expansion since 2004 in China. But alwaysthepatentsoftheR & Dmanufacturersrely oncopyrightexportbusiness model. But alwaysthepatentsoftheR & Dmanufacturersrely oncopyrightexportbusiness model. But because
of the patents of the R & D manufacturers, we rely on copyright export
business model. Until recent year, China inline game industry has received
their harvest on their way of global market. Such as Shengda company bought a
U.S online company and changed it into a community online game. They also established
North America branch in 2010.
Researcher said, Tencent
hands in Korea NSE Company action new game force to global market, this move will
bring broader development of Tencent game business. Even though I never play
this game Sura before, I did research some of the picture from the game. It has
a rich oriental color screen, smooth combat experience and strategy changing
battle model. Both players and media were pay attention on this game before it
released. At the same time, there are comments that the Sura with darken style
and the character style settings also tend to be the trend of globalization. The
game has strong scalability and with room for adjustment to meet the
preferences of the different players of the global market. So that it will meet
the requirement of global promotion. Beside in Korea and China, America and
Euro will have large market people will love this game.
But before that, in
2011, Tencent had planned for the way of global market.Tencent acquired the majority stake of U.S. online game
company Riot Games. They did so is to pave the way for the future development
in North America, Russia, Southeast Asia, India and many countries in the
world. More than that, Tencent purchased ZAM game site made by Europe and the
United States. They obtained the market analysis and global top plug production.
Even though oversea
market has a bigger stage, China never stand on the world’s top rank of online
games. Chinese online game operators always stick to the local market. Overseer
market is attractive, but still Chinese operators are looking for the strategy of
world partnership global operations. Because they believe that Chinese online
games technology hasn’t mature and perfect. If company rushes into global
market individually, fail and lost money are the only result they will receive.
Tencent is a compant that has no supplier, no
marketing middlemen. Tencent uses the way of self-promotion and allows users to
produce psychological dependence on their products. This strategic started from
Tecent’s inception. Only in this way, company’s products can meet their target
users directly and reduce costs. At the same time, it improves the company's
competitiveness.
The company’s target market is consumers and directly
to all the Chinese. No matter they are students or worker; overseas Chinese or
they are living in China. Tencent makes appropriate changes according to the
requirements people on the Internet. Until now, Tencent has variety of products
based on users’ needs. For example: from the beginning, Tencent only had the
chatting tool. Step by step, they develop the aspects on entertainment,
e-commerce, searching tool, music, video, client application software and other
types of services. The ways to change lead to Tencent’s success in the online
world. Furthermore, Tencent has becomes a public media. The news Tencent
provides has become the only source for part of the online users. And Shenzhen
government offered great help for Tencent since it established. Tencent itself
also form a culture called Q culture.
Population impact on Tencent- China has the largest population
in the world. The population is over 1.4 billion. Tencent has a great impact on
people’s study, work and lives, the main reason is its instant messenger—QQ. Therefore,
Tencent’s target consumer group has large span on age, start from the 10
year-old elementary school student, to the 80 years old elder people. The news I
read one week ago on TV, it shows that some Chinese community encourages elder
people to learn how to use QQ to contact with their children. Most of the young
generation work away from home and the only chance they can go back to their
hometown is spring festival. QQ is the popular tool that they can contact with
family. With the expansion of the products, the age structure of their
consumption will also change in the future.
Economic impact on Tencent- Nowadays, China is
developing with the high speed. In 2012, Chinese GDP growths at the speed of
7.8. People’s per capita income rise substantially, and people’s purchase power
grows at the meanwhile. With the world financial crisis had impact on China in
2008, the network products decreased at the same time. However, due to the mass
users, financial crisis didn’t bring a huge harm on Tencent’s operation.
Competitive impacts
on Tencent- Chines network hasn’t mature when Tencent established. For this
reason, Tencent step-by-step development and change, and slowly accumulated a
large number of users. Tencent has penetrated the market prior to other
competitors. Just like Facebook is so popular in western countries, log in QQ
and contact with friends and colleagues become Chinese daily life. Chinese government
blocks Facebook and Twitter in China. I can’t open Facebook’s website or create
an account. And that means Tencent lost two major competitors. Since I was an elementary
school student, I used QQ to contact with my classmates, it won’t cause you
money, unlike dialing the phone. When I grow up, there are more and more
chatting tools came up. I would like to download them and tried. Such as
Fetion, MSN, and Sina. I stop using them and keep on using QQ for the reason
that the other products are not as common as QQ. I can’t chat with my friend if
they don’t download the software. The second reason is that those products are
simplification. On the other hand, Tencent has diversity of products that
connect together. I can play games with
my friends; share my music or video with them. More than that, we can have a conference
with specific group of people; ask for help with people all over the world.
Tencent makes my life easier and faster. So when I came to America, I still use
QQ to connect my Chinese friends who live in China or America. I own a Facebook
account right after I came here, but I seldom upload pictures on it. Facebook is
only a tool I can contact with my foreign friends. As I know, most of the young
generation who came to U.S has at least one QQ account number. And we get more
used to using QQ as a way we connect each other.
“Tencent,
Inc. will be more responsible to our customers and the society.” Said Mr. Ma,
the founder of Tencent, Inc. Corporation social responsibility is not only
respond to our investors, but also respond to our customers, partners,
employees, even the promotion of harmony to the whole society. To improve a
healthy, sustainable development internet environment is Tencent’s goal.
“Responsibility
helps us to grow steadily.” Said Mr. Liu, the CEO of Tencent, Inc. How much
money we can make from it is not the most important we are looking for,
instead, we are looking for the intangible value the Tencent open platform will
bring to us and the society.And this is
also the basic business value. As Mr. Liu said in a speech.
As one of
the Chinese largest Internet service providers and one of the internet
companies owing the largest amount of users, Tencent creates its own value
prior to other internet services; it makes people’s lives richer and improves
people’s quality of lives.
In May,
2008, Tencent was first elected to the constituent stocks of the Hang Seng
Index. Therefore, Tencent started to summarize the social responsibility of the
company's operations over the past decade. And company worked out the first CSR
report in the form of white paper. In 2009, Tencent was participated in the
Oxfam assessment, ranked 14. In 2011, Tencent established the CSR department,
built up management system and work modules. At the same time, company released
the CSR report of year 2008-2010. In 2012, Tencent expected to establish
evaluation index system of CSR and promote the implementation of CSR system.Furthermore, Tencent will make CSR system
integrates into business operation completely.
Tencent
released guidelines called open platform. It is a strategic that works with the
third parties. Open platform means necessary to meet users’ needs. At the same
time, it helps more small and medium-sized entrepreneurs. With the access to
the third parties application, Tencent insists to the premise of ensuring the
security of user information. In addition, Tencent stressed that the third
parties could bring scalability after they join with the open platform. Thus,
it is the win-win situation.The open platform includes opensns. qq. com( QQ
community); open. Tenpay.com; open. Soso.com; pop.paipai.com; open.t.qq.com.
There is a
Chinese largest public service portal gongyi.net. It was established by
Tencent, Inc. In this website, public charitable organization can use the
benefit of mass users, contact with recipients and donors easily and instantly.
Tencent provides the simple, public diversity way for users to experience,
participate and inspect public service activities. Strated from the southern
snowstorm in 2008, Tencent set to emergency mode for a major disaster. After that,
when there was major disaster happened in China, Tencent foundation will make a
decision and donation basic on the disaster assessment. Until 2010, Tencent had
donated over 55 million RMB for the major disasters, not only in China; it also
includes the serious earthquake happened in Haiti. Tencent also called out mass
users to donate and collected total 36.46 million RMB. In addition, Tencent has
contributed to education, environment, medical, internet and construction area.
In my
opinion, except the contribution for the society; Tencent should pay more
attention to its own product’s development. Internet security is also an
important part for corporation reasonability. As I heard my cases my friends
been through, there are some people use the vulnerabilities of network, steal
other people’s QQ numbers and information. Then stealers deceive people’s money
or public untrue statement. Many people had reported the cases to Tencent. But
still, I just met the same situation. My QQ number was stolen a few weeks ago.
And one of my friend in China told me that a strange used logged in my QQ
number. He tried to borrow money from my friend on behalf of me. Of course my
friend didn’t do so when she noticed. So, in that case, I think Tencent also
need to focus on improving the security of their products.
As I mentioned
in the last blog, Tencent, Inc .‘s mission is to enhance people's quality of
life through Internet services. Focus on the long-term development of the
company by putting consumer value above short-term commercial interests.
S--During
the development, the large user networks and super user relationship chain is the
greatest strengths and core competencies of Tencent, Inc. The company has
accumulated a large number of users because of the main product QICQ( current
QQ),which was created in the early days of the company’s founding. QICO
established a large platform for Tencnet ‘s later development. According to the
research, currently registered users are over one billion, and active users are
more than six million.
Basic on the
large relationship on the internet, Tencent can contact the maximum range of
users in the meantime. This advantage can let users know the newest products in
a short time. When Tencentopens up a
new product, there is a current large group of customers ready to receive the
new product information.So that Tencent
can exceed his competitors all the time.
Different kinds
of products involve wide range of aspects. When users log in QQ, they can use
many different kinds of services or function that Tencent provide. And all the
function are related, you can find it once you log into the QQ page. First of
all, Tencent has portal related to its products, such as the instant QQ message,
WeChat,SOSO search, QQ e-mail and Tencent .com. These features satisfy users’ group
communication and resources sharing. Second, QQ music, QQ games and QQ pets can
satisfy customer’s entertainment requirement and personality. Furthermore, the
C2C E-commerce platform is offer for customer’s trading needs. Many business
and advertisements are posted and updated every second.
W--However,
products excessive and investment diversification is either Tencent’s advantage
or disadvantage. In addition, most of Tencent’s products imitate existing
products on the market. Even though Tencent has good market sharing of its
products, it could not be the best without its own creativity.I have use Tencent’s products since I was an
elementary school student. I found that the most part I don’t like is that
there are so many plug-in advertisements on my QQ webpage. Ordinary user can
not cancel the ads, only Tencent membership can do that. However, you have to
pay for the membership every month. These unwanted features and ads would slow
down computer’s running and occupy cyberspace.
O--Tencent
has very important status in China, especially in the Internet. At the same
time, China’s rapid development also provides a good environment for Tencent’s
developing. No matter in internet trading or communication. In addition,
organizations start to use software to manage and communicate with employees.
Tencent released QQ corporation version TM in 2003, in order to help company manage
their company more effective. But so far, MSN still has more market share than
Tencent TM. It is an opportunity for Tencent to further improve their product.
T--More than
that, there are threats in Tencent’s development. First, Tencent excessively
depend on the QQ users. Tencent don’t have progress on the product itself or create
its new product. Once Tencent lost the QQ users, then no one would like to buy
their products because of the huge competition. Further, in the mobile instant
messaging aspect, China mobile released Fetion service. Comparing to China
Mobile has the advantage of its own mobile communication; Tencent is weaker at
this part. At present, there are more and more small companies spring up. More and
more instant massagers or apps are launched. And Tencent released WeChat for competition. But their function is so close that the
whole market is close to saturation. This is undoubtedly a huge challenge for Tencent
at this moment.
Tencent,
Inc. was founded in November, 1998. It has grown into China’s largest and most
used Internet service portal. During company's development, Tencent has maintained
steady growth under its user-oriented operating strategies. On June 16, 2004,
Tencent Holdings Limited (SEHK 700) went public on the main board of the Hong
Kong Stock Exchange. The headquarter of Tenccent, Inc. is located in Nanshan
district, Shenzhen, China.
Ma Hua Teng (Mr. Ma), current CEO of Tencent, Inc., accompanied with his classmates officially registered a company called Shenzhen Tencent computer system Inc. This company's main business is to expand wireless network paging systems at that time. But before that, in 1997, Mr. Ma got an opportunity to contact ICQ and became one of its users. He personally felt the charm of ICQ, as well as the limitations of this product. First, ICQ only had English version; second, ICQ had the problem of operation difficulty. It made ICQ domestic use broad, but still not particularly widespread in China. Therefore, Mr. Ma and his friends decided to develop Chinese version ICQ software. Tencent, Inc. officially launched Tencent QQ In February, 1999, which is an instant messenger and became the most famous product of Tencent company.
In the aspect of marketing philosophie, Tencent is providing value-added Internet, mobile and telecom services and online advertising under the strategic goal of providing users with "one-stop online lifestyle services". Tencent’s leading Internet platforms in China – QQ (QQ Instant Messenger), QQ.com, QQ Games, Qzone, 3g.QQ.com, SoSo, PaiPai and Tenpay – have brought together China's largest Internet community, to meet the various needs of Internet users including communication, information, entertainment, e-commerce and others. As of Sep 30, 2011, the active QQ users accounts for QQ IM amounted to 711.7 million while its peak concurrent users reach 145.4 million.
Tencent,
Inc. focuses on what its customers want and the marketing needs. It shows on
the company’s mission: to enhance people's quality of life through Internet
services. To treat the Internet like electricity: a reliable service that makes
life easier and more enjoyable. To address the diverse needs of different
regions and consumers by offering differentiated products and services. To build
a healthy and win-win Internet ecology based on open collaboration with
partners. Consumer value as first priority, as it shows in Tencent’s website. Focusing
on the long-term development of the company by putting consumer value above short-term
commercial interests. Developing a deep understanding of consumer needs in
order to provide the most satisfying products and services. Communicating
candidly with consumers, respect their feelings, and grow with their evolving
needs.
Tencent,
Inc. treats its employees like a family. Company provides employees with
comfortable working environments and attractive incentives. They coach and
encourage employees to achieve success in work based on the attitudes of trust
and respect. Company considered employees as its most precious asset and
emphasized on the training of employees. They will offer different kinds of
trainings to different employees depend on their positions.
Different from the B2B electronic commerce mentioned
in the chapter 7, Tencent’s e-commerce is more focus on C2C and B2C. According
to the research, Chinese C2C e-commerce marketing share is far more than B2C,
which is different from American. However, the trend of changing from C2C to
B2C has begun. So does Tencent.
Paipai.com and QQ Mall focus on C2C e-commerce,
Buy.QQ.om focuses on B2C e-commerce. In March, 2013, Tencent announced that they
are going to merge its own brands QQ Mall and Buy.QQ.com to one and the only brand
open platform of Tencent B2B e-commerce. And Paipai .com will still exists in
the form of C2C. After merging, Tencent will cancel signing contract with those
sellers with bad service and trading records, and keep the high reputation
sellers, in order to offer customers the best products and services.
In addition, before 2013, China's most influential
shopping rebate site (fepai.com) and Tencent announced to be strategic alliances.
Tencent has 300 million users and over 90% of them are potential online
shopping customers. This group of customers is more likely to shop online, or
group shopping. But they also lack of rebate information. With the cooperation
between fepai.com and Tencent, Tencent users can buy products from fepai.com
without register a new account. They can log in with their QQ account and share
the products or rebates they get in QQ community. Tencent used the chance of
cooperation with fepai.com (B2C e-commerce); they can be familiar about the B2C
e-commerce. Therefore, in 2013, as I mentioned before, Tencent has internal
merge for its own brands, and make its products more mature.
Even though Tencent seems to be the NO.1 in online
world in so many aspects, like instant messenger, online games, Taobao.com is still
the boss in B2C or C2C e-commerce. As you can see from the chart, Taobao.com (blue
slice) occupies 71.6% market share, and Paipai.com only has 7.97% market share
(Beige slice).
Tencent has large amount of users, but compared to Taobao.com,
Paipai.com has less suppliers and sellers. So that the products and services
they offer and less than Taobao.com. I am the users of Tencent for more than
ten years, but I never shop on Paipai.com. I buy products on Taobao.com most of
the time. First of all, I think Taobao website has more organized and
attractive. They specify every product exactly in different category so that
buyers can easily find out the products they want. Then, Taobao will design
webpage depend on Chinese tradition holiday, in order to create a festive
atmosphere. Second, they have so many registered sellers in Taobao.com than
Paipai. Paipai is C2C commerce, but Taobao also has B2C e-commerce. That means
Taobao offers business companies or suppliers directly selling products to
customers. Therefore, the price of each product is more competitive that buyers
can get the cheapest price in Taobao.
Tencent has different products category for
different customers’ needs. First, Tencent has divides their products into the
following ways: communication, community exchange, casual games, action games,
online games, mobile and life style. Second, based on customer’s needs,
communication also can be divided into QQ, QQ mail, QQ software, QQ micro-blog,
QQ show, QQ membership etc. QQ zone, Friend, photo albums, QQ music, QQ live,
Podcasts are all included in the range of community exchange.
Tenccent marketing segmentation mostly reflects on
its games. Tencent Games is one of the biggest open platforms, as well as the
largest online game community in China. It
is divided into six market segments: action, shooting, MMO, sports, casual, online
games, in order to meet millions of Tencent users’ demands. The new games
Tencent recently released have different characteristics. In the action games,
Tencent released dark style “Sura” and comicize style “Swiftwind Blade”; Tencent
also develops the first third-person shooter online game "Gun Gods"
and Science-Fiction style game “Metro Conflict”. “The segmenting of games
market is conducive to business growth.” As one of the Tencent Game development
department employees said.
After the
long time marketing research of Tencent, they found that action online games
market is far from saturated. Different styles, different type of play action
game has great appeal to players. Therefore, not only Tencent continue has
their internal independent research and development, they also focus on the
open platform to attract different companies to released games in Tencent open
platform.
The Games mentioned above like “Sura” and Gun Gods”
are more suitable for the professional players. It needs time to finish one
level and continue to the next. At the same time, this games needs to buy “weapons”
in order to defeat the enemy. It is also a way Tencent earn the profit from, “weapons”
need money to buy. As a non-professional game player, I won’t spend thousands
of RMB to buy “weapons” that I can’t even touch. In addition, some action games
are too more violent for girls to play. Therefore, I usually play casual games.
Table Tennis, Tennis Games or QQ speed are the games I used to play. What I want
is to relax and having fun during playing games, but playing the acting games
make me feel pressure.
Many people including my Chinese classmate in
Business 104 class said that Tencent’s biggest failure is lack of innovation. Such
as its chatting tool, online games and the searching tool. I agree with it. If Tencent
still want to be the boss in the online world, it needs innovation. Sina.com is
one of the biggest competitors of Tencent. However, we need to admit that
Tencent is successful on its products, even though it copies other companies’
ideas.
Many netizens criticized Tencent plagiarism
practices. But the CEO of Tencent replies that innovation is not necessarily to
create an unprecedented product. Innovation can be improved existing products,
and offer a better experience to customers. That’s a way of success. Wechat
becomes a main product of Tencent, it also imitated the foreign voice application
KIKI. But no one can deny Wechat’s success. Wechat’s registers has over two
hundred million, the user average monthly growth is 10 million. The hottest
word in China is micro-innovation, it means incremental innovation. We can easily
find the micro-innovation from Apps update. For example, Wechat1.0, voice chat
is the basic feature; Wechat 2.0 then we can join a group chat; 3.0 we can add
a stranger for chatting; 4.0 Wechat offered an open platform; 4.3 version with
a public account that we can receive any messages sending from famous stars.
Wechat changes from a mere communication tool to a public mobileplatform.
Even though “Add Friends" is one of the core
function point of Wechat, the new function “Shake” is much more attractive. “Shake”
is a function you can search strangers by shaking your phone. It is like a
magical adventure. You never know who are you going to chat with and where he
or she from. I tried “Shake” today, and there were people from Australia,
Thailand, Spain, even Switzerland. No one ever expect that a function seems
stupid but can bring 100 million times of shaking per day.
Tencent manages its product by listening to
customers. Each time of product updates is not perfect; Tencent believes they
still can make it better. Listen to customer’s feedback is the most effective
way to improve their products. There is a website especially for customers’
feedback. Customers can call, chat online with Tencent’s employees or e-mail
them the problems they face. In addition, blog, micro-blog or Wechat are the
platforms customers would like to express their complaints to new products. So in
the development of a new product, Tenccent would establish a special group to
follow customer’s micro-blog or Wechat, listen and check how customers feel
about the new product and its functions. So that Tencent can know their problem and improve
it in a short time. The CEO of Tencent said that this method is stupid, but it
works.
I think Tencent’s competitive advantage reflect on
its users chain. Started from 1998, Tencent cumulative a large group of users. Many
people say Tencent QQ is low-end product, only students or immature people
would like to use, because QQ lack of innovation. However, I don’t agree with
this. Tencent was founded in 1998, and I became a QQ user in 2001, when I was a
Junior High school student. As I know, QQ was popular software that everyone in
the school knew and own an account. With so many years past, many of us has
graduated from college and working for different companies. But the main point
is that, we still using QQ as a way to contact each other.
It’s not out of fashion, or is not only for mature
people to use. In my QQ account, I can contact my friends in China, even though
I lost their phone numbers. One of my friends in China told me that the first
thing she back to the company is turn on the company and log in her QQ account.
Her daily contact with customers and suppliers is through using QQ. In
addition, many new Chinese friends I met here, they still using QQ. Some of
them have been here for more than 5 years, but the first choice and convenient
way to contact friends is using QQ. The huge relationship chain makes us stick
on QQ and depend on it.
More than that, Tencent used IM platform to communicate
with its customers effectively, in order to initiate company’s influence in the
online world. For example, in 2008, Olympic Games held in Beijing, China.
Chinese people were so excited for this year’s coming. On the same day Beijing
Olympic flame lit, Coca-Cola work together to Tencent QQ, and organized a
"Coca-Cola Olympic torch pass online activities. To most of the Chinese,
passing the Olympic torch seems impossible in the reality world. But the activity
Tencent held was a perfect way common people can join Olympic and show their
feeling to this great international activity. A torchbearer of QQ users can
send an invitation to their QQ friends. The torch has been passed down, and to
complete with a lit torch icon as marked besides the QQ account. In only 130
days, there were more than 62 million people joined the activity and passed the
torch.
Coca-Cola and Tencent launched this activity will
also increase their own brand awareness, and improved the reputation in a short
period of time. I think the most critical element for the successful of this
activity is interaction. Using the huge relationship chain of QQ users, Common
people can feel the passion by passing the torch to participate in the Olympic,
just like the real torchbearers. Furthermore, more and more people would know
more about Coca-Cola and Tencent. It was a great way to improve corporate image
and mass communicate with customers.
90% of Tencent users are around 19 to 35 years old. The
young generation is a group of customer eager to new products with passion and curious.
With the promotion of smartphones, more and more colleges student or young generation
have at least one smartphones. Instant messager with mobile version can satisfy
customers’ needs for communication. Because young people like to show their charm
and special to peer, Tencent develops a new version of mobile QQ especially aim
at young people.
First of all, new QQ version added with the feature
custom chart background. Customer can download any background Tencent provides
or you can use your own picture as a chart background. Any of your background
setting will not be visible for your friends or strangers, it protects
customers’ privacy. But if you would like to, you can share the same picture
background with your friends. Tencent released more and more features that
users can show their personality and charms by designing their own characteristic.
For example, the chart background, QQ skin, custom reply, QQ shows, QQ games
characters, etc.
At the same time, Tencent improves their products in
many ways. Tencent moves the features “add new friends” to the top of the “online
friend”. Compare to the PC version, Mobile QQ is easier for users to add new
friend. PC version were made the feature “add new friend” at the bottom of the
main page, it only with a magnifier besides it. New QQ customers would feel
more comfortable to use Mobile version, because it is simple and organized. In addition,
Tencent lighten the font color to make it soft and clear. Before that, the font
color of Tencent’s chatting tool is too dark. Users’ eyes may feel tired after
a long time watching the screen.
Another popular product is Wehat. Wechat is the
expansion of Tencent QQ. It is also a chatting tool. But what is different from
QQ is that, you can receive your friends’ messages any time even though you are
offline. More than that, you can create a Wechat account and add your QQ friends
as your Wechat friends. But if you don’t have a QQ account, you can add new
friend through the feature “search around” or “scan QR code”. Wechat is more
secure than QQ; Tencent released the feature of Official account that
especially for stars. Wechat only have mobile version, is quite safer than QQ. That’s
why most of the stars in China would like to use Wechat to contact with their
friends. Another reason stars use Wechat is that stars from HK and Taiwan they don’t
have QQ account, they use Facebook most of the time. However, mainland China blocked
Facebook. Therefore, Wechat is the perfect chatting tool they can use for communicating,
no matter they are in HK or Taiwan even mainland China.
Recently, more and more people focus on smart phones
and tablets. These products have features with large screen, latest technology
and portable that attracts people to buy. The sales of smartphones are far more
than PCs in 2013. Because the media pipeline changes, there are more than 800 million Tencent
instant messaging service active users. More than that, Tencent uses different online
platforms to attract advertising investors.
As I said before, most of the young generation
Chinese have at least one Tencent active account. Online game is one of the
entertainments for young generation. Tencent offers platform for games
developers to release their games. Therefore, there are so many different kinds
of games that would satisfy men and women’s needs. When I was a high school
student, I played QQ online games with my friends. Of course, I don’t like
violent games, we played casual games most of the time. And there is a program
called QQ shows that connects to our online games. We used QQ shows to dress up
the game characters. Tencent provides free dress for users. At first, my
friends and I would like to try the free one. But as time goes by, we would
like to pay for new ones. For the reason that Tencent only provides limited and
simple dresses. At that time, we thought QQ shows was a way can represent our
sense and personality, we arranged different dress on the game characters and
find the best one. And day by day, when we tired of the dress, we paid for
another one. Start from the beginning, Tencent offers the free but limited dress,
then kids addicted to it, they would like to pay more money on the best dress. This
also happens on when men buy their weapons in the games.
In addition, Tencent used Chinese New Year to have sweepstakes.
The more times you use Tencent products to send New Year wishes to your friends
and family, the luckiest you can win lucky money from Tencent. The New Year
promotion also include in online games. They have different packages for players
to choose, includes weapons packages, level update packages and diamond package.
Tencent members also can get 40% off.
Further, Tencent joint with Coca Cola have sweepstakes.
You can buy any Coca Cola products and there is a code inside. Customers can
log in the website and enter the sweepstakes code. You can be informed if you
won immediately. The prizes are the virtual packages offered by Tencent. Each QQ
account only can win 10 prized at most every day. And you can’t resent the
prize to friends. I am not interested in the prizes Tencent offers now. I like
sweepstakes, but as I grow up, I didn’t spend much time on games and QQ shows
any more. The prizes mean nothing for me. So even if I was in China, I have the
opportunity to join this activity, I won’t pay more attention on the
sweepstakes or turn on the computer to check if I won.
Basically, I never seen Tencent has any advertisement
shows on TV, newspaper or magazine. Tencent promotes its brand or products
through the following ways:
First, Tencent enhances brand image with large
world-wide activities. In 2010, Shanghai World Expo was a chance. Before 2009,
Tencent has a well strategy for World Expo. First of all, Teencent opened up
the World Expo channel. At the same time, they used QQ to launch online
activities to spread the Expo concept of environmental protection. Tencentaims
to let users cultivate a better understanding of and concerned about the Expo. After
a few months, Tencent has large amount of users joined the Expo activities. Basic
on this,Tencent used three major demands to attract
advertisers—Expo, users’ amount and users demands. In general, Tencent were in
a win-win situation. Not only users were attracted by Tencent’s Expo package
activities, but also Tencent earned the profit by ads.
Second, related to users. In the thanksgiving holiday
in 2012, Tencent released a brand commercial online. The video showed us the
theme of Love; it recorded the most common scenes in our daily life, including
a wife waiting for her husband from late night off-work; a father recorded for
his son’s growing up moments, the love of friend, sister, teacher and public. These
videos were very touching. It related to this holiday and the love we can find
in our daily life. Of course, in those video also implanted Tencent’s products,
in order to show users and non-users’ audiences that Tencent’s products are
related to people’s life. With using Tencent’s chatting tool or Qzone, we can
communicate with the one we loved easily and more convenient.
Third, star effect. For example, sometime when I watch
a star interview, different from the normal microphone, a star holding a mic
that attaches with a medium large brand logo—Tencent QQ with a signature Penguin.
Furthermore, Tencent would sponsor some
award ceremony, such as Chinese Music Award. Normally winner will award a
trophy, but at the same time, winner also receives a Tencent QQ stuffed animal.
Using the powerful effect of TV and stars, Tenccent quickly increased products
awareness and attract more investors and users.
Inditex is a Spanish company. Zara is one of the well-known
and oldest brands of Inditex. Inditex has eight brands; Zara and Zara Home are the
two most famous brands. Which are located in Deportivo La Coruna, Spain with
its headquarter-Inditex. Zara advocates fast fashion. They are basically imitating
the latest fashions, and then sell products at cheaper prices. Inditex's brand
- Zara, Zara Home, Bershka, Massimo Dutti, Oysho, Stradivarius, Pull & Bear
and Uterqüe –all follow Zara mode: beautiful high-end store sale fashionable
and decent workmanship, but low-priced products.
Zara open its 2200 retail stores in Euro and other
55 countries in a very short time. More than that, Zara opens up its online
store. Combine these two sale channels, Zara’s global turnover reached to 4.6
billion euros in 2004, better than the American brand GAP.
Different from the luxury brand like Gucci, Zara pursues
fast fashion. For example, Zara designs a fall/winter series, then each style
are issued only three or four dress, or shirt, or jacket to a store. There are
only small amount of stock left in each store. However, if customer needs
another size, store manager can apply for multiple shipments. All of the sales
have been perfectly well trained, they will record customer’s reaction to each
clothes. Listen and ask what customers need and their comments on Zara
products. Every day, store manager will hand in all the customer information to
headquarter. Headquarter then will send the information to their huge design
team. Designers will quickly develop a new design and send the draft to the
factory to produce the new products. Because of Zara’s fast fashion, the
products in the store update very quickly. You may not find a same dress in a
Zara store within 2 weeks. They want to make sure their products are unique but
low-priced.
When I lived in China, I never shopped in Zara. I knew
Zara is a famous brand. But as a student, I can’t afford it. More than that,
because of its noble decoration, I couldn’t even walk into the store. For me, Zara
is shopped by the rich with its high price. However, the first time I shopped
in Zara was 2 weeks ago. I was looking for a jacket for spring. I aimless
opened Zara’s online website and surprised at their low-priced. Therefore, I walked
into SOHO Zara after work. As usual, Zara uses beautiful decoration and bright
lights. What’s different from the Zara store in China is that, SOHO Zara’s décor
is more close to civilians. You can freely select your cloths without any
uncomfortable. There are some cloths designs for office working ladies, as well
as some young line products that suitable for college students. I was thinking Zara
can be my future shopping store. However, fitting room is one thing I want to
complain. I picked up 2 cloths and supposed to go to the fitting room and try
them. I stood in line for more than 20 minutes, but the line hardly moved a
walk. I have no idea what’s going on the line, or if there was any employee controlling
the line. I gave up waiting on line. Instead, I bought the jacket and tried it
at home. The best thing is that you can return it within 30 days after
purchasing.
All the business Tencent built up is basic on two platforms:
Tencent instant messages and internet service portal. Until Jun, 2005, Tencent
has initially completed the layout of online business model of industrial life.
Tencent established QQ, internet service portal, QQ games and mobile service
portal, which has built a huge online community. To meet the demand for
information transfer and knowledge acquisition, Tencent develops internet
service portal, QQ IM and QQ e-mail. To meet the demand of group communication and resource sharing, Tencent releases
Q-Zone and QQ group. In the aspects of personality showing and entertainment service,
Tencent has diversity of virtual imagine products, including QQ pet, QQ show,
QQ games, QQ music, QQ radio and QQ live TV. To meet the demand of online
trade, Tencent releases E-commerce Pai Pai online trade.
Most people have inertia
when they using internet service. People are lazy to find another service
provider if one website or one provider can satisfy all their needs. They will
focus on using the same service provider. Otherwise, searching a new provider
will cost more time and money. So in this way, Tencent has the inherent
advantages to open up e-commerce. Because Tencent has occupied 76% of the
instant messaging market share. That means they have the monopoly advantage on customer
channel.
At the same time, Tecent
released the special service for membership customers. Tencent designs a lot of
privileges special for advanced users, and strengthen the manifestation of
"Member" and the difference between ordinary users. Through this
exclusive glory service, Tencent attracts ordinary users to register as a membership.
Based on this model, Tencent continue to introduce new products and new levels
to continuously meet the membership user endless "desire". So that
membership users will stick on this product for period of time even though
membership has to pay money every month.
In addition, Tencent
opens platform for third-party applications to paid subscribers that cover almost
users of all ages. Age 14 to 25 years old is the largest group of paid
subscribers. It shows that the paid subscribers age are getting younger and younger.
Paying customers are mainly distributed in early high school and undergraduate;
mostly to high school and undergraduate education, accounting for 71.39%. This phenomenon
exists for two main reasons. First, except employees who work in the office,
student is a group spending the longest time on computer. They are also the
target customer of Tencent. According to the research,students and white-collar workers (including company
employees and management personnel) are the highest portion of Tencent users,
respectively 32% and 30%, accounting for 15% of the users of freelance. Second,
either membership fee or the games fee is cheap so that students can afford
every month. Furthermore, white-collar workers have a large portion on online
shopping or trade, because of their higher purchasing power and working environment.
The proportion of
male and female users is 59:41. Men will focus on playing several applications each
month, and male users are twice active than women. In the opposite, women
prefer to try different applications. In addition, men prefer to play the
game-type applications. Compared to men, women prefer to play non-active game,
such as tools, lifestyle applications basic on their personalities.
Tencent not only focus on WeChat‘s(instant massager
app) development in mainland China, they also has plans for the oversea market
in 2012. First, through theoperationofthecapital
level, Tencent bought the share of Korea KaKao Company, and own the
share of 13.54%. The investment amount is $ 63 million. In addition, Tencent
released a new App especially for the Indonesia market. It called Qute.
According to the market research, the users of Qute have over one million in
July, 2012. What’s interesting is that KaKao announced to offcially enter into
Indoesia market. Basic on the partnership between Tencent and KaKao, Qute and
KaKao, even Tencent will become competitors.
Except
for QQ and WeChat, Tencent Games is one of the main products of Tencent. In
2012, The
UP2012Tencentgameannualconference, Tencent
announced that they had obtained the global agent aoperating rights of Korean
action new game called Sura. Sura is not only the first online game Tencent
obtained as an international agent, it is also the first step Tencent plans for
its own company’s development for global stage. The road to oversea online game
industry has gradual expansion since 2004 in China. But alwaysthepatentsoftheR & Dmanufacturersrely oncopyrightexportbusiness model. But alwaysthepatentsoftheR & Dmanufacturersrely oncopyrightexportbusiness model. But because
of the patents of the R & D manufacturers, we rely on copyright export
business model. Until recent year, China inline game industry has received
their harvest on their way of global market. Such as Shengda company bought a
U.S online company and changed it into a community online game. They also established
North America branch in 2010.
Researcher said, Tencent
hands in Korea NSE Company action new game force to global market, this move will
bring broader development of Tencent game business. Even though I never play
this game Sura before, I did research some of the picture from the game. It has
a rich oriental color screen, smooth combat experience and strategy changing
battle model. Both players and media were pay attention on this game before it
released. At the same time, there are comments that the Sura with darken style
and the character style settings also tend to be the trend of globalization. The
game has strong scalability and with room for adjustment to meet the
preferences of the different players of the global market. So that it will meet
the requirement of global promotion. Beside in Korea and China, America and
Euro will have large market people will love this game.
But before that, in
2011, Tencent had planned for the way of global market.Tencent acquired the majority stake of U.S. online game
company Riot Games. They did so is to pave the way for the future development
in North America, Russia, Southeast Asia, India and many countries in the
world. More than that, Tencent purchased ZAM game site made by Europe and the
United States. They obtained the market analysis and global top plug production.
Even though oversea
market has a bigger stage, China never stand on the world’s top rank of online
games. Chinese online game operators always stick to the local market. Overseer
market is attractive, but still Chinese operators are looking for the strategy of
world partnership global operations. Because they believe that Chinese online
games technology hasn’t mature and perfect. If company rushes into global
market individually, fail and lost money are the only result they will receive.
Tencent is a compant that has no supplier, no
marketing middlemen. Tencent uses the way of self-promotion and allows users to
produce psychological dependence on their products. This strategic started from
Tecent’s inception. Only in this way, company’s products can meet their target
users directly and reduce costs. At the same time, it improves the company's
competitiveness.
The company’s target market is consumers and directly
to all the Chinese. No matter they are students or worker; overseas Chinese or
they are living in China. Tencent makes appropriate changes according to the
requirements people on the Internet. Until now, Tencent has variety of products
based on users’ needs. For example: from the beginning, Tencent only had the
chatting tool. Step by step, they develop the aspects on entertainment,
e-commerce, searching tool, music, video, client application software and other
types of services. The ways to change lead to Tencent’s success in the online
world. Furthermore, Tencent has becomes a public media. The news Tencent
provides has become the only source for part of the online users. And Shenzhen
government offered great help for Tencent since it established. Tencent itself
also form a culture called Q culture.
Population impact on Tencent- China has the largest population
in the world. The population is over 1.4 billion. Tencent has a great impact on
people’s study, work and lives, the main reason is its instant messenger—QQ. Therefore,
Tencent’s target consumer group has large span on age, start from the 10
year-old elementary school student, to the 80 years old elder people. The news I
read one week ago on TV, it shows that some Chinese community encourages elder
people to learn how to use QQ to contact with their children. Most of the young
generation work away from home and the only chance they can go back to their
hometown is spring festival. QQ is the popular tool that they can contact with
family. With the expansion of the products, the age structure of their
consumption will also change in the future.
Economic impact on Tencent- Nowadays, China is
developing with the high speed. In 2012, Chinese GDP growths at the speed of
7.8. People’s per capita income rise substantially, and people’s purchase power
grows at the meanwhile. With the world financial crisis had impact on China in
2008, the network products decreased at the same time. However, due to the mass
users, financial crisis didn’t bring a huge harm on Tencent’s operation.
Competitive impacts
on Tencent- Chines network hasn’t mature when Tencent established. For this
reason, Tencent step-by-step development and change, and slowly accumulated a
large number of users. Tencent has penetrated the market prior to other
competitors. Just like Facebook is so popular in western countries, log in QQ
and contact with friends and colleagues become Chinese daily life. Chinese government
blocks Facebook and Twitter in China. I can’t open Facebook’s website or create
an account. And that means Tencent lost two major competitors. Since I was an elementary
school student, I used QQ to contact with my classmates, it won’t cause you
money, unlike dialing the phone. When I grow up, there are more and more
chatting tools came up. I would like to download them and tried. Such as
Fetion, MSN, and Sina. I stop using them and keep on using QQ for the reason
that the other products are not as common as QQ. I can’t chat with my friend if
they don’t download the software. The second reason is that those products are
simplification. On the other hand, Tencent has diversity of products that
connect together. I can play games with
my friends; share my music or video with them. More than that, we can have a conference
with specific group of people; ask for help with people all over the world.
Tencent makes my life easier and faster. So when I came to America, I still use
QQ to connect my Chinese friends who live in China or America. I own a Facebook
account right after I came here, but I seldom upload pictures on it. Facebook is
only a tool I can contact with my foreign friends. As I know, most of the young
generation who came to U.S has at least one QQ account number. And we get more
used to using QQ as a way we connect each other.
“Tencent,
Inc. will be more responsible to our customers and the society.” Said Mr. Ma,
the founder of Tencent, Inc. Corporation social responsibility is not only
respond to our investors, but also respond to our customers, partners,
employees, even the promotion of harmony to the whole society. To improve a
healthy, sustainable development internet environment is Tencent’s goal.
“Responsibility
helps us to grow steadily.” Said Mr. Liu, the CEO of Tencent, Inc. How much
money we can make from it is not the most important we are looking for,
instead, we are looking for the intangible value the Tencent open platform will
bring to us and the society.And this is
also the basic business value. As Mr. Liu said in a speech.
As one of
the Chinese largest Internet service providers and one of the internet
companies owing the largest amount of users, Tencent creates its own value
prior to other internet services; it makes people’s lives richer and improves
people’s quality of lives.
In May,
2008, Tencent was first elected to the constituent stocks of the Hang Seng
Index. Therefore, Tencent started to summarize the social responsibility of the
company's operations over the past decade. And company worked out the first CSR
report in the form of white paper. In 2009, Tencent was participated in the
Oxfam assessment, ranked 14. In 2011, Tencent established the CSR department,
built up management system and work modules. At the same time, company released
the CSR report of year 2008-2010. In 2012, Tencent expected to establish
evaluation index system of CSR and promote the implementation of CSR system.Furthermore, Tencent will make CSR system
integrates into business operation completely.
Tencent
released guidelines called open platform. It is a strategic that works with the
third parties. Open platform means necessary to meet users’ needs. At the same
time, it helps more small and medium-sized entrepreneurs. With the access to
the third parties application, Tencent insists to the premise of ensuring the
security of user information. In addition, Tencent stressed that the third
parties could bring scalability after they join with the open platform. Thus,
it is the win-win situation.The open platform includes opensns. qq. com( QQ
community); open. Tenpay.com; open. Soso.com; pop.paipai.com; open.t.qq.com.
There is a
Chinese largest public service portal gongyi.net. It was established by
Tencent, Inc. In this website, public charitable organization can use the
benefit of mass users, contact with recipients and donors easily and instantly.
Tencent provides the simple, public diversity way for users to experience,
participate and inspect public service activities. Strated from the southern
snowstorm in 2008, Tencent set to emergency mode for a major disaster. After that,
when there was major disaster happened in China, Tencent foundation will make a
decision and donation basic on the disaster assessment. Until 2010, Tencent had
donated over 55 million RMB for the major disasters, not only in China; it also
includes the serious earthquake happened in Haiti. Tencent also called out mass
users to donate and collected total 36.46 million RMB. In addition, Tencent has
contributed to education, environment, medical, internet and construction area.
In my
opinion, except the contribution for the society; Tencent should pay more
attention to its own product’s development. Internet security is also an
important part for corporation reasonability. As I heard my cases my friends
been through, there are some people use the vulnerabilities of network, steal
other people’s QQ numbers and information. Then stealers deceive people’s money
or public untrue statement. Many people had reported the cases to Tencent. But
still, I just met the same situation. My QQ number was stolen a few weeks ago.
And one of my friend in China told me that a strange used logged in my QQ
number. He tried to borrow money from my friend on behalf of me. Of course my
friend didn’t do so when she noticed. So, in that case, I think Tencent also
need to focus on improving the security of their products.
As I mentioned
in the last blog, Tencent, Inc .‘s mission is to enhance people's quality of
life through Internet services. Focus on the long-term development of the
company by putting consumer value above short-term commercial interests.
S--During
the development, the large user networks and super user relationship chain is the
greatest strengths and core competencies of Tencent, Inc. The company has
accumulated a large number of users because of the main product QICQ( current
QQ),which was created in the early days of the company’s founding. QICO
established a large platform for Tencnet ‘s later development. According to the
research, currently registered users are over one billion, and active users are
more than six million.
Basic on the
large relationship on the internet, Tencent can contact the maximum range of
users in the meantime. This advantage can let users know the newest products in
a short time. When Tencentopens up a
new product, there is a current large group of customers ready to receive the
new product information.So that Tencent
can exceed his competitors all the time.
Different kinds
of products involve wide range of aspects. When users log in QQ, they can use
many different kinds of services or function that Tencent provide. And all the
function are related, you can find it once you log into the QQ page. First of
all, Tencent has portal related to its products, such as the instant QQ message,
WeChat,SOSO search, QQ e-mail and Tencent .com. These features satisfy users’ group
communication and resources sharing. Second, QQ music, QQ games and QQ pets can
satisfy customer’s entertainment requirement and personality. Furthermore, the
C2C E-commerce platform is offer for customer’s trading needs. Many business
and advertisements are posted and updated every second.
W--However,
products excessive and investment diversification is either Tencent’s advantage
or disadvantage. In addition, most of Tencent’s products imitate existing
products on the market. Even though Tencent has good market sharing of its
products, it could not be the best without its own creativity.I have use Tencent’s products since I was an
elementary school student. I found that the most part I don’t like is that
there are so many plug-in advertisements on my QQ webpage. Ordinary user can
not cancel the ads, only Tencent membership can do that. However, you have to
pay for the membership every month. These unwanted features and ads would slow
down computer’s running and occupy cyberspace.
O--Tencent
has very important status in China, especially in the Internet. At the same
time, China’s rapid development also provides a good environment for Tencent’s
developing. No matter in internet trading or communication. In addition,
organizations start to use software to manage and communicate with employees.
Tencent released QQ corporation version TM in 2003, in order to help company manage
their company more effective. But so far, MSN still has more market share than
Tencent TM. It is an opportunity for Tencent to further improve their product.
T--More than
that, there are threats in Tencent’s development. First, Tencent excessively
depend on the QQ users. Tencent don’t have progress on the product itself or create
its new product. Once Tencent lost the QQ users, then no one would like to buy
their products because of the huge competition. Further, in the mobile instant
messaging aspect, China mobile released Fetion service. Comparing to China
Mobile has the advantage of its own mobile communication; Tencent is weaker at
this part. At present, there are more and more small companies spring up. More and
more instant massagers or apps are launched. And Tencent released WeChat for competition. But their function is so close that the
whole market is close to saturation. This is undoubtedly a huge challenge for Tencent
at this moment.
Tencent,
Inc. was founded in November, 1998. It has grown into China’s largest and most
used Internet service portal. During company's development, Tencent has maintained
steady growth under its user-oriented operating strategies. On June 16, 2004,
Tencent Holdings Limited (SEHK 700) went public on the main board of the Hong
Kong Stock Exchange. The headquarter of Tenccent, Inc. is located in Nanshan
district, Shenzhen, China.
Ma Hua Teng (Mr. Ma), current CEO of Tencent, Inc., accompanied with his classmates officially registered a company called Shenzhen Tencent computer system Inc. This company's main business is to expand wireless network paging systems at that time. But before that, in 1997, Mr. Ma got an opportunity to contact ICQ and became one of its users. He personally felt the charm of ICQ, as well as the limitations of this product. First, ICQ only had English version; second, ICQ had the problem of operation difficulty. It made ICQ domestic use broad, but still not particularly widespread in China. Therefore, Mr. Ma and his friends decided to develop Chinese version ICQ software. Tencent, Inc. officially launched Tencent QQ In February, 1999, which is an instant messenger and became the most famous product of Tencent company.
In the aspect of marketing philosophie, Tencent is providing value-added Internet, mobile and telecom services and online advertising under the strategic goal of providing users with "one-stop online lifestyle services". Tencent’s leading Internet platforms in China – QQ (QQ Instant Messenger), QQ.com, QQ Games, Qzone, 3g.QQ.com, SoSo, PaiPai and Tenpay – have brought together China's largest Internet community, to meet the various needs of Internet users including communication, information, entertainment, e-commerce and others. As of Sep 30, 2011, the active QQ users accounts for QQ IM amounted to 711.7 million while its peak concurrent users reach 145.4 million.
Tencent,
Inc. focuses on what its customers want and the marketing needs. It shows on
the company’s mission: to enhance people's quality of life through Internet
services. To treat the Internet like electricity: a reliable service that makes
life easier and more enjoyable. To address the diverse needs of different
regions and consumers by offering differentiated products and services. To build
a healthy and win-win Internet ecology based on open collaboration with
partners. Consumer value as first priority, as it shows in Tencent’s website. Focusing
on the long-term development of the company by putting consumer value above short-term
commercial interests. Developing a deep understanding of consumer needs in
order to provide the most satisfying products and services. Communicating
candidly with consumers, respect their feelings, and grow with their evolving
needs.
Tencent,
Inc. treats its employees like a family. Company provides employees with
comfortable working environments and attractive incentives. They coach and
encourage employees to achieve success in work based on the attitudes of trust
and respect. Company considered employees as its most precious asset and
emphasized on the training of employees. They will offer different kinds of
trainings to different employees depend on their positions.
Different from the B2B electronic commerce mentioned
in the chapter 7, Tencent’s e-commerce is more focus on C2C and B2C. According
to the research, Chinese C2C e-commerce marketing share is far more than B2C,
which is different from American. However, the trend of changing from C2C to
B2C has begun. So does Tencent.
Paipai.com and QQ Mall focus on C2C e-commerce,
Buy.QQ.om focuses on B2C e-commerce. In March, 2013, Tencent announced that they
are going to merge its own brands QQ Mall and Buy.QQ.com to one and the only brand
open platform of Tencent B2B e-commerce. And Paipai .com will still exists in
the form of C2C. After merging, Tencent will cancel signing contract with those
sellers with bad service and trading records, and keep the high reputation
sellers, in order to offer customers the best products and services.
In addition, before 2013, China's most influential
shopping rebate site (fepai.com) and Tencent announced to be strategic alliances.
Tencent has 300 million users and over 90% of them are potential online
shopping customers. This group of customers is more likely to shop online, or
group shopping. But they also lack of rebate information. With the cooperation
between fepai.com and Tencent, Tencent users can buy products from fepai.com
without register a new account. They can log in with their QQ account and share
the products or rebates they get in QQ community. Tencent used the chance of
cooperation with fepai.com (B2C e-commerce); they can be familiar about the B2C
e-commerce. Therefore, in 2013, as I mentioned before, Tencent has internal
merge for its own brands, and make its products more mature.
Even though Tencent seems to be the NO.1 in online
world in so many aspects, like instant messenger, online games, Taobao.com is still
the boss in B2C or C2C e-commerce. As you can see from the chart, Taobao.com (blue
slice) occupies 71.6% market share, and Paipai.com only has 7.97% market share
(Beige slice).
Tencent has large amount of users, but compared to Taobao.com,
Paipai.com has less suppliers and sellers. So that the products and services
they offer and less than Taobao.com. I am the users of Tencent for more than
ten years, but I never shop on Paipai.com. I buy products on Taobao.com most of
the time. First of all, I think Taobao website has more organized and
attractive. They specify every product exactly in different category so that
buyers can easily find out the products they want. Then, Taobao will design
webpage depend on Chinese tradition holiday, in order to create a festive
atmosphere. Second, they have so many registered sellers in Taobao.com than
Paipai. Paipai is C2C commerce, but Taobao also has B2C e-commerce. That means
Taobao offers business companies or suppliers directly selling products to
customers. Therefore, the price of each product is more competitive that buyers
can get the cheapest price in Taobao.
Tencent has different products category for
different customers’ needs. First, Tencent has divides their products into the
following ways: communication, community exchange, casual games, action games,
online games, mobile and life style. Second, based on customer’s needs,
communication also can be divided into QQ, QQ mail, QQ software, QQ micro-blog,
QQ show, QQ membership etc. QQ zone, Friend, photo albums, QQ music, QQ live,
Podcasts are all included in the range of community exchange.
Tenccent marketing segmentation mostly reflects on
its games. Tencent Games is one of the biggest open platforms, as well as the
largest online game community in China. It
is divided into six market segments: action, shooting, MMO, sports, casual, online
games, in order to meet millions of Tencent users’ demands. The new games
Tencent recently released have different characteristics. In the action games,
Tencent released dark style “Sura” and comicize style “Swiftwind Blade”; Tencent
also develops the first third-person shooter online game "Gun Gods"
and Science-Fiction style game “Metro Conflict”. “The segmenting of games
market is conducive to business growth.” As one of the Tencent Game development
department employees said.
After the
long time marketing research of Tencent, they found that action online games
market is far from saturated. Different styles, different type of play action
game has great appeal to players. Therefore, not only Tencent continue has
their internal independent research and development, they also focus on the
open platform to attract different companies to released games in Tencent open
platform.
The Games mentioned above like “Sura” and Gun Gods”
are more suitable for the professional players. It needs time to finish one
level and continue to the next. At the same time, this games needs to buy “weapons”
in order to defeat the enemy. It is also a way Tencent earn the profit from, “weapons”
need money to buy. As a non-professional game player, I won’t spend thousands
of RMB to buy “weapons” that I can’t even touch. In addition, some action games
are too more violent for girls to play. Therefore, I usually play casual games.
Table Tennis, Tennis Games or QQ speed are the games I used to play. What I want
is to relax and having fun during playing games, but playing the acting games
make me feel pressure.
Many people including my Chinese classmate in
Business 104 class said that Tencent’s biggest failure is lack of innovation. Such
as its chatting tool, online games and the searching tool. I agree with it. If Tencent
still want to be the boss in the online world, it needs innovation. Sina.com is
one of the biggest competitors of Tencent. However, we need to admit that
Tencent is successful on its products, even though it copies other companies’
ideas.
Many netizens criticized Tencent plagiarism
practices. But the CEO of Tencent replies that innovation is not necessarily to
create an unprecedented product. Innovation can be improved existing products,
and offer a better experience to customers. That’s a way of success. Wechat
becomes a main product of Tencent, it also imitated the foreign voice application
KIKI. But no one can deny Wechat’s success. Wechat’s registers has over two
hundred million, the user average monthly growth is 10 million. The hottest
word in China is micro-innovation, it means incremental innovation. We can easily
find the micro-innovation from Apps update. For example, Wechat1.0, voice chat
is the basic feature; Wechat 2.0 then we can join a group chat; 3.0 we can add
a stranger for chatting; 4.0 Wechat offered an open platform; 4.3 version with
a public account that we can receive any messages sending from famous stars.
Wechat changes from a mere communication tool to a public mobileplatform.
Even though “Add Friends" is one of the core
function point of Wechat, the new function “Shake” is much more attractive. “Shake”
is a function you can search strangers by shaking your phone. It is like a
magical adventure. You never know who are you going to chat with and where he
or she from. I tried “Shake” today, and there were people from Australia,
Thailand, Spain, even Switzerland. No one ever expect that a function seems
stupid but can bring 100 million times of shaking per day.
Tencent manages its product by listening to
customers. Each time of product updates is not perfect; Tencent believes they
still can make it better. Listen to customer’s feedback is the most effective
way to improve their products. There is a website especially for customers’
feedback. Customers can call, chat online with Tencent’s employees or e-mail
them the problems they face. In addition, blog, micro-blog or Wechat are the
platforms customers would like to express their complaints to new products. So in
the development of a new product, Tenccent would establish a special group to
follow customer’s micro-blog or Wechat, listen and check how customers feel
about the new product and its functions. So that Tencent can know their problem and improve
it in a short time. The CEO of Tencent said that this method is stupid, but it
works.
I think Tencent’s competitive advantage reflect on
its users chain. Started from 1998, Tencent cumulative a large group of users. Many
people say Tencent QQ is low-end product, only students or immature people
would like to use, because QQ lack of innovation. However, I don’t agree with
this. Tencent was founded in 1998, and I became a QQ user in 2001, when I was a
Junior High school student. As I know, QQ was popular software that everyone in
the school knew and own an account. With so many years past, many of us has
graduated from college and working for different companies. But the main point
is that, we still using QQ as a way to contact each other.
It’s not out of fashion, or is not only for mature
people to use. In my QQ account, I can contact my friends in China, even though
I lost their phone numbers. One of my friends in China told me that the first
thing she back to the company is turn on the company and log in her QQ account.
Her daily contact with customers and suppliers is through using QQ. In
addition, many new Chinese friends I met here, they still using QQ. Some of
them have been here for more than 5 years, but the first choice and convenient
way to contact friends is using QQ. The huge relationship chain makes us stick
on QQ and depend on it.
More than that, Tencent used IM platform to communicate
with its customers effectively, in order to initiate company’s influence in the
online world. For example, in 2008, Olympic Games held in Beijing, China.
Chinese people were so excited for this year’s coming. On the same day Beijing
Olympic flame lit, Coca-Cola work together to Tencent QQ, and organized a
"Coca-Cola Olympic torch pass online activities. To most of the Chinese,
passing the Olympic torch seems impossible in the reality world. But the activity
Tencent held was a perfect way common people can join Olympic and show their
feeling to this great international activity. A torchbearer of QQ users can
send an invitation to their QQ friends. The torch has been passed down, and to
complete with a lit torch icon as marked besides the QQ account. In only 130
days, there were more than 62 million people joined the activity and passed the
torch.
Coca-Cola and Tencent launched this activity will
also increase their own brand awareness, and improved the reputation in a short
period of time. I think the most critical element for the successful of this
activity is interaction. Using the huge relationship chain of QQ users, Common
people can feel the passion by passing the torch to participate in the Olympic,
just like the real torchbearers. Furthermore, more and more people would know
more about Coca-Cola and Tencent. It was a great way to improve corporate image
and mass communicate with customers.
90% of Tencent users are around 19 to 35 years old. The
young generation is a group of customer eager to new products with passion and curious.
With the promotion of smartphones, more and more colleges student or young generation
have at least one smartphones. Instant messager with mobile version can satisfy
customers’ needs for communication. Because young people like to show their charm
and special to peer, Tencent develops a new version of mobile QQ especially aim
at young people.
First of all, new QQ version added with the feature
custom chart background. Customer can download any background Tencent provides
or you can use your own picture as a chart background. Any of your background
setting will not be visible for your friends or strangers, it protects
customers’ privacy. But if you would like to, you can share the same picture
background with your friends. Tencent released more and more features that
users can show their personality and charms by designing their own characteristic.
For example, the chart background, QQ skin, custom reply, QQ shows, QQ games
characters, etc.
At the same time, Tencent improves their products in
many ways. Tencent moves the features “add new friends” to the top of the “online
friend”. Compare to the PC version, Mobile QQ is easier for users to add new
friend. PC version were made the feature “add new friend” at the bottom of the
main page, it only with a magnifier besides it. New QQ customers would feel
more comfortable to use Mobile version, because it is simple and organized. In addition,
Tencent lighten the font color to make it soft and clear. Before that, the font
color of Tencent’s chatting tool is too dark. Users’ eyes may feel tired after
a long time watching the screen.
Another popular product is Wehat. Wechat is the
expansion of Tencent QQ. It is also a chatting tool. But what is different from
QQ is that, you can receive your friends’ messages any time even though you are
offline. More than that, you can create a Wechat account and add your QQ friends
as your Wechat friends. But if you don’t have a QQ account, you can add new
friend through the feature “search around” or “scan QR code”. Wechat is more
secure than QQ; Tencent released the feature of Official account that
especially for stars. Wechat only have mobile version, is quite safer than QQ. That’s
why most of the stars in China would like to use Wechat to contact with their
friends. Another reason stars use Wechat is that stars from HK and Taiwan they don’t
have QQ account, they use Facebook most of the time. However, mainland China blocked
Facebook. Therefore, Wechat is the perfect chatting tool they can use for communicating,
no matter they are in HK or Taiwan even mainland China.
Recently, more and more people focus on smart phones
and tablets. These products have features with large screen, latest technology
and portable that attracts people to buy. The sales of smartphones are far more
than PCs in 2013. Because the media pipeline changes, there are more than 800 million Tencent
instant messaging service active users. More than that, Tencent uses different online
platforms to attract advertising investors.
As I said before, most of the young generation
Chinese have at least one Tencent active account. Online game is one of the
entertainments for young generation. Tencent offers platform for games
developers to release their games. Therefore, there are so many different kinds
of games that would satisfy men and women’s needs. When I was a high school
student, I played QQ online games with my friends. Of course, I don’t like
violent games, we played casual games most of the time. And there is a program
called QQ shows that connects to our online games. We used QQ shows to dress up
the game characters. Tencent provides free dress for users. At first, my
friends and I would like to try the free one. But as time goes by, we would
like to pay for new ones. For the reason that Tencent only provides limited and
simple dresses. At that time, we thought QQ shows was a way can represent our
sense and personality, we arranged different dress on the game characters and
find the best one. And day by day, when we tired of the dress, we paid for
another one. Start from the beginning, Tencent offers the free but limited dress,
then kids addicted to it, they would like to pay more money on the best dress. This
also happens on when men buy their weapons in the games.
In addition, Tencent used Chinese New Year to have sweepstakes.
The more times you use Tencent products to send New Year wishes to your friends
and family, the luckiest you can win lucky money from Tencent. The New Year
promotion also include in online games. They have different packages for players
to choose, includes weapons packages, level update packages and diamond package.
Tencent members also can get 40% off.
Further, Tencent joint with Coca Cola have sweepstakes.
You can buy any Coca Cola products and there is a code inside. Customers can
log in the website and enter the sweepstakes code. You can be informed if you
won immediately. The prizes are the virtual packages offered by Tencent. Each QQ
account only can win 10 prized at most every day. And you can’t resent the
prize to friends. I am not interested in the prizes Tencent offers now. I like
sweepstakes, but as I grow up, I didn’t spend much time on games and QQ shows
any more. The prizes mean nothing for me. So even if I was in China, I have the
opportunity to join this activity, I won’t pay more attention on the
sweepstakes or turn on the computer to check if I won.
Basically, I never seen Tencent has any advertisement
shows on TV, newspaper or magazine. Tencent promotes its brand or products
through the following ways:
First, Tencent enhances brand image with large
world-wide activities. In 2010, Shanghai World Expo was a chance. Before 2009,
Tencent has a well strategy for World Expo. First of all, Teencent opened up
the World Expo channel. At the same time, they used QQ to launch online
activities to spread the Expo concept of environmental protection. Tencentaims
to let users cultivate a better understanding of and concerned about the Expo. After
a few months, Tencent has large amount of users joined the Expo activities. Basic
on this,Tencent used three major demands to attract
advertisers—Expo, users’ amount and users demands. In general, Tencent were in
a win-win situation. Not only users were attracted by Tencent’s Expo package
activities, but also Tencent earned the profit by ads.
Second, related to users. In the thanksgiving holiday
in 2012, Tencent released a brand commercial online. The video showed us the
theme of Love; it recorded the most common scenes in our daily life, including
a wife waiting for her husband from late night off-work; a father recorded for
his son’s growing up moments, the love of friend, sister, teacher and public. These
videos were very touching. It related to this holiday and the love we can find
in our daily life. Of course, in those video also implanted Tencent’s products,
in order to show users and non-users’ audiences that Tencent’s products are
related to people’s life. With using Tencent’s chatting tool or Qzone, we can
communicate with the one we loved easily and more convenient.
Third, star effect. For example, sometime when I watch
a star interview, different from the normal microphone, a star holding a mic
that attaches with a medium large brand logo—Tencent QQ with a signature Penguin.
Furthermore, Tencent would sponsor some
award ceremony, such as Chinese Music Award. Normally winner will award a
trophy, but at the same time, winner also receives a Tencent QQ stuffed animal.
Using the powerful effect of TV and stars, Tenccent quickly increased products
awareness and attract more investors and users.
Inditex is a Spanish company. Zara is one of the well-known
and oldest brands of Inditex. Inditex has eight brands; Zara and Zara Home are the
two most famous brands. Which are located in Deportivo La Coruna, Spain with
its headquarter-Inditex. Zara advocates fast fashion. They are basically imitating
the latest fashions, and then sell products at cheaper prices. Inditex's brand
- Zara, Zara Home, Bershka, Massimo Dutti, Oysho, Stradivarius, Pull & Bear
and Uterqüe –all follow Zara mode: beautiful high-end store sale fashionable
and decent workmanship, but low-priced products.
Zara open its 2200 retail stores in Euro and other
55 countries in a very short time. More than that, Zara opens up its online
store. Combine these two sale channels, Zara’s global turnover reached to 4.6
billion euros in 2004, better than the American brand GAP.
Different from the luxury brand like Gucci, Zara pursues
fast fashion. For example, Zara designs a fall/winter series, then each style
are issued only three or four dress, or shirt, or jacket to a store. There are
only small amount of stock left in each store. However, if customer needs
another size, store manager can apply for multiple shipments. All of the sales
have been perfectly well trained, they will record customer’s reaction to each
clothes. Listen and ask what customers need and their comments on Zara
products. Every day, store manager will hand in all the customer information to
headquarter. Headquarter then will send the information to their huge design
team. Designers will quickly develop a new design and send the draft to the
factory to produce the new products. Because of Zara’s fast fashion, the
products in the store update very quickly. You may not find a same dress in a
Zara store within 2 weeks. They want to make sure their products are unique but
low-priced.
When I lived in China, I never shopped in Zara. I knew
Zara is a famous brand. But as a student, I can’t afford it. More than that,
because of its noble decoration, I couldn’t even walk into the store. For me, Zara
is shopped by the rich with its high price. However, the first time I shopped
in Zara was 2 weeks ago. I was looking for a jacket for spring. I aimless
opened Zara’s online website and surprised at their low-priced. Therefore, I walked
into SOHO Zara after work. As usual, Zara uses beautiful decoration and bright
lights. What’s different from the Zara store in China is that, SOHO Zara’s décor
is more close to civilians. You can freely select your cloths without any
uncomfortable. There are some cloths designs for office working ladies, as well
as some young line products that suitable for college students. I was thinking Zara
can be my future shopping store. However, fitting room is one thing I want to
complain. I picked up 2 cloths and supposed to go to the fitting room and try
them. I stood in line for more than 20 minutes, but the line hardly moved a
walk. I have no idea what’s going on the line, or if there was any employee controlling
the line. I gave up waiting on line. Instead, I bought the jacket and tried it
at home. The best thing is that you can return it within 30 days after
purchasing.
All the business Tencent built up is basic on two platforms:
Tencent instant messages and internet service portal. Until Jun, 2005, Tencent
has initially completed the layout of online business model of industrial life.
Tencent established QQ, internet service portal, QQ games and mobile service
portal, which has built a huge online community. To meet the demand for
information transfer and knowledge acquisition, Tencent develops internet
service portal, QQ IM and QQ e-mail. To meet the demand of group communication and resource sharing, Tencent releases
Q-Zone and QQ group. In the aspects of personality showing and entertainment service,
Tencent has diversity of virtual imagine products, including QQ pet, QQ show,
QQ games, QQ music, QQ radio and QQ live TV. To meet the demand of online
trade, Tencent releases E-commerce Pai Pai online trade.
Most people have inertia
when they using internet service. People are lazy to find another service
provider if one website or one provider can satisfy all their needs. They will
focus on using the same service provider. Otherwise, searching a new provider
will cost more time and money. So in this way, Tencent has the inherent
advantages to open up e-commerce. Because Tencent has occupied 76% of the
instant messaging market share. That means they have the monopoly advantage on customer
channel.
At the same time, Tecent
released the special service for membership customers. Tencent designs a lot of
privileges special for advanced users, and strengthen the manifestation of
"Member" and the difference between ordinary users. Through this
exclusive glory service, Tencent attracts ordinary users to register as a membership.
Based on this model, Tencent continue to introduce new products and new levels
to continuously meet the membership user endless "desire". So that
membership users will stick on this product for period of time even though
membership has to pay money every month.
In addition, Tencent
opens platform for third-party applications to paid subscribers that cover almost
users of all ages. Age 14 to 25 years old is the largest group of paid
subscribers. It shows that the paid subscribers age are getting younger and younger.
Paying customers are mainly distributed in early high school and undergraduate;
mostly to high school and undergraduate education, accounting for 71.39%. This phenomenon
exists for two main reasons. First, except employees who work in the office,
student is a group spending the longest time on computer. They are also the
target customer of Tencent. According to the research,students and white-collar workers (including company
employees and management personnel) are the highest portion of Tencent users,
respectively 32% and 30%, accounting for 15% of the users of freelance. Second,
either membership fee or the games fee is cheap so that students can afford
every month. Furthermore, white-collar workers have a large portion on online
shopping or trade, because of their higher purchasing power and working environment.
The proportion of
male and female users is 59:41. Men will focus on playing several applications each
month, and male users are twice active than women. In the opposite, women
prefer to try different applications. In addition, men prefer to play the
game-type applications. Compared to men, women prefer to play non-active game,
such as tools, lifestyle applications basic on their personalities.
Tencent not only focus on WeChat‘s(instant massager
app) development in mainland China, they also has plans for the oversea market
in 2012. First, through theoperationofthecapital
level, Tencent bought the share of Korea KaKao Company, and own the
share of 13.54%. The investment amount is $ 63 million. In addition, Tencent
released a new App especially for the Indonesia market. It called Qute.
According to the market research, the users of Qute have over one million in
July, 2012. What’s interesting is that KaKao announced to offcially enter into
Indoesia market. Basic on the partnership between Tencent and KaKao, Qute and
KaKao, even Tencent will become competitors.
Except
for QQ and WeChat, Tencent Games is one of the main products of Tencent. In
2012, The
UP2012Tencentgameannualconference, Tencent
announced that they had obtained the global agent aoperating rights of Korean
action new game called Sura. Sura is not only the first online game Tencent
obtained as an international agent, it is also the first step Tencent plans for
its own company’s development for global stage. The road to oversea online game
industry has gradual expansion since 2004 in China. But alwaysthepatentsoftheR & Dmanufacturersrely oncopyrightexportbusiness model. But alwaysthepatentsoftheR & Dmanufacturersrely oncopyrightexportbusiness model. But because
of the patents of the R & D manufacturers, we rely on copyright export
business model. Until recent year, China inline game industry has received
their harvest on their way of global market. Such as Shengda company bought a
U.S online company and changed it into a community online game. They also established
North America branch in 2010.
Researcher said, Tencent
hands in Korea NSE Company action new game force to global market, this move will
bring broader development of Tencent game business. Even though I never play
this game Sura before, I did research some of the picture from the game. It has
a rich oriental color screen, smooth combat experience and strategy changing
battle model. Both players and media were pay attention on this game before it
released. At the same time, there are comments that the Sura with darken style
and the character style settings also tend to be the trend of globalization. The
game has strong scalability and with room for adjustment to meet the
preferences of the different players of the global market. So that it will meet
the requirement of global promotion. Beside in Korea and China, America and
Euro will have large market people will love this game.
But before that, in
2011, Tencent had planned for the way of global market.Tencent acquired the majority stake of U.S. online game
company Riot Games. They did so is to pave the way for the future development
in North America, Russia, Southeast Asia, India and many countries in the
world. More than that, Tencent purchased ZAM game site made by Europe and the
United States. They obtained the market analysis and global top plug production.
Even though oversea
market has a bigger stage, China never stand on the world’s top rank of online
games. Chinese online game operators always stick to the local market. Overseer
market is attractive, but still Chinese operators are looking for the strategy of
world partnership global operations. Because they believe that Chinese online
games technology hasn’t mature and perfect. If company rushes into global
market individually, fail and lost money are the only result they will receive.
Tencent is a compant that has no supplier, no
marketing middlemen. Tencent uses the way of self-promotion and allows users to
produce psychological dependence on their products. This strategic started from
Tecent’s inception. Only in this way, company’s products can meet their target
users directly and reduce costs. At the same time, it improves the company's
competitiveness.
The company’s target market is consumers and directly
to all the Chinese. No matter they are students or worker; overseas Chinese or
they are living in China. Tencent makes appropriate changes according to the
requirements people on the Internet. Until now, Tencent has variety of products
based on users’ needs. For example: from the beginning, Tencent only had the
chatting tool. Step by step, they develop the aspects on entertainment,
e-commerce, searching tool, music, video, client application software and other
types of services. The ways to change lead to Tencent’s success in the online
world. Furthermore, Tencent has becomes a public media. The news Tencent
provides has become the only source for part of the online users. And Shenzhen
government offered great help for Tencent since it established. Tencent itself
also form a culture called Q culture.
Population impact on Tencent- China has the largest population
in the world. The population is over 1.4 billion. Tencent has a great impact on
people’s study, work and lives, the main reason is its instant messenger—QQ. Therefore,
Tencent’s target consumer group has large span on age, start from the 10
year-old elementary school student, to the 80 years old elder people. The news I
read one week ago on TV, it shows that some Chinese community encourages elder
people to learn how to use QQ to contact with their children. Most of the young
generation work away from home and the only chance they can go back to their
hometown is spring festival. QQ is the popular tool that they can contact with
family. With the expansion of the products, the age structure of their
consumption will also change in the future.
Economic impact on Tencent- Nowadays, China is
developing with the high speed. In 2012, Chinese GDP growths at the speed of
7.8. People’s per capita income rise substantially, and people’s purchase power
grows at the meanwhile. With the world financial crisis had impact on China in
2008, the network products decreased at the same time. However, due to the mass
users, financial crisis didn’t bring a huge harm on Tencent’s operation.
Competitive impacts
on Tencent- Chines network hasn’t mature when Tencent established. For this
reason, Tencent step-by-step development and change, and slowly accumulated a
large number of users. Tencent has penetrated the market prior to other
competitors. Just like Facebook is so popular in western countries, log in QQ
and contact with friends and colleagues become Chinese daily life. Chinese government
blocks Facebook and Twitter in China. I can’t open Facebook’s website or create
an account. And that means Tencent lost two major competitors. Since I was an elementary
school student, I used QQ to contact with my classmates, it won’t cause you
money, unlike dialing the phone. When I grow up, there are more and more
chatting tools came up. I would like to download them and tried. Such as
Fetion, MSN, and Sina. I stop using them and keep on using QQ for the reason
that the other products are not as common as QQ. I can’t chat with my friend if
they don’t download the software. The second reason is that those products are
simplification. On the other hand, Tencent has diversity of products that
connect together. I can play games with
my friends; share my music or video with them. More than that, we can have a conference
with specific group of people; ask for help with people all over the world.
Tencent makes my life easier and faster. So when I came to America, I still use
QQ to connect my Chinese friends who live in China or America. I own a Facebook
account right after I came here, but I seldom upload pictures on it. Facebook is
only a tool I can contact with my foreign friends. As I know, most of the young
generation who came to U.S has at least one QQ account number. And we get more
used to using QQ as a way we connect each other.
“Tencent,
Inc. will be more responsible to our customers and the society.” Said Mr. Ma,
the founder of Tencent, Inc. Corporation social responsibility is not only
respond to our investors, but also respond to our customers, partners,
employees, even the promotion of harmony to the whole society. To improve a
healthy, sustainable development internet environment is Tencent’s goal.
“Responsibility
helps us to grow steadily.” Said Mr. Liu, the CEO of Tencent, Inc. How much
money we can make from it is not the most important we are looking for,
instead, we are looking for the intangible value the Tencent open platform will
bring to us and the society.And this is
also the basic business value. As Mr. Liu said in a speech.
As one of
the Chinese largest Internet service providers and one of the internet
companies owing the largest amount of users, Tencent creates its own value
prior to other internet services; it makes people’s lives richer and improves
people’s quality of lives.
In May,
2008, Tencent was first elected to the constituent stocks of the Hang Seng
Index. Therefore, Tencent started to summarize the social responsibility of the
company's operations over the past decade. And company worked out the first CSR
report in the form of white paper. In 2009, Tencent was participated in the
Oxfam assessment, ranked 14. In 2011, Tencent established the CSR department,
built up management system and work modules. At the same time, company released
the CSR report of year 2008-2010. In 2012, Tencent expected to establish
evaluation index system of CSR and promote the implementation of CSR system.Furthermore, Tencent will make CSR system
integrates into business operation completely.
Tencent
released guidelines called open platform. It is a strategic that works with the
third parties. Open platform means necessary to meet users’ needs. At the same
time, it helps more small and medium-sized entrepreneurs. With the access to
the third parties application, Tencent insists to the premise of ensuring the
security of user information. In addition, Tencent stressed that the third
parties could bring scalability after they join with the open platform. Thus,
it is the win-win situation.The open platform includes opensns. qq. com( QQ
community); open. Tenpay.com; open. Soso.com; pop.paipai.com; open.t.qq.com.
There is a
Chinese largest public service portal gongyi.net. It was established by
Tencent, Inc. In this website, public charitable organization can use the
benefit of mass users, contact with recipients and donors easily and instantly.
Tencent provides the simple, public diversity way for users to experience,
participate and inspect public service activities. Strated from the southern
snowstorm in 2008, Tencent set to emergency mode for a major disaster. After that,
when there was major disaster happened in China, Tencent foundation will make a
decision and donation basic on the disaster assessment. Until 2010, Tencent had
donated over 55 million RMB for the major disasters, not only in China; it also
includes the serious earthquake happened in Haiti. Tencent also called out mass
users to donate and collected total 36.46 million RMB. In addition, Tencent has
contributed to education, environment, medical, internet and construction area.
In my
opinion, except the contribution for the society; Tencent should pay more
attention to its own product’s development. Internet security is also an
important part for corporation reasonability. As I heard my cases my friends
been through, there are some people use the vulnerabilities of network, steal
other people’s QQ numbers and information. Then stealers deceive people’s money
or public untrue statement. Many people had reported the cases to Tencent. But
still, I just met the same situation. My QQ number was stolen a few weeks ago.
And one of my friend in China told me that a strange used logged in my QQ
number. He tried to borrow money from my friend on behalf of me. Of course my
friend didn’t do so when she noticed. So, in that case, I think Tencent also
need to focus on improving the security of their products.
As I mentioned
in the last blog, Tencent, Inc .‘s mission is to enhance people's quality of
life through Internet services. Focus on the long-term development of the
company by putting consumer value above short-term commercial interests.
S--During
the development, the large user networks and super user relationship chain is the
greatest strengths and core competencies of Tencent, Inc. The company has
accumulated a large number of users because of the main product QICQ( current
QQ),which was created in the early days of the company’s founding. QICO
established a large platform for Tencnet ‘s later development. According to the
research, currently registered users are over one billion, and active users are
more than six million.
Basic on the
large relationship on the internet, Tencent can contact the maximum range of
users in the meantime. This advantage can let users know the newest products in
a short time. When Tencentopens up a
new product, there is a current large group of customers ready to receive the
new product information.So that Tencent
can exceed his competitors all the time.
Different kinds
of products involve wide range of aspects. When users log in QQ, they can use
many different kinds of services or function that Tencent provide. And all the
function are related, you can find it once you log into the QQ page. First of
all, Tencent has portal related to its products, such as the instant QQ message,
WeChat,SOSO search, QQ e-mail and Tencent .com. These features satisfy users’ group
communication and resources sharing. Second, QQ music, QQ games and QQ pets can
satisfy customer’s entertainment requirement and personality. Furthermore, the
C2C E-commerce platform is offer for customer’s trading needs. Many business
and advertisements are posted and updated every second.
W--However,
products excessive and investment diversification is either Tencent’s advantage
or disadvantage. In addition, most of Tencent’s products imitate existing
products on the market. Even though Tencent has good market sharing of its
products, it could not be the best without its own creativity.I have use Tencent’s products since I was an
elementary school student. I found that the most part I don’t like is that
there are so many plug-in advertisements on my QQ webpage. Ordinary user can
not cancel the ads, only Tencent membership can do that. However, you have to
pay for the membership every month. These unwanted features and ads would slow
down computer’s running and occupy cyberspace.
O--Tencent
has very important status in China, especially in the Internet. At the same
time, China’s rapid development also provides a good environment for Tencent’s
developing. No matter in internet trading or communication. In addition,
organizations start to use software to manage and communicate with employees.
Tencent released QQ corporation version TM in 2003, in order to help company manage
their company more effective. But so far, MSN still has more market share than
Tencent TM. It is an opportunity for Tencent to further improve their product.
T--More than
that, there are threats in Tencent’s development. First, Tencent excessively
depend on the QQ users. Tencent don’t have progress on the product itself or create
its new product. Once Tencent lost the QQ users, then no one would like to buy
their products because of the huge competition. Further, in the mobile instant
messaging aspect, China mobile released Fetion service. Comparing to China
Mobile has the advantage of its own mobile communication; Tencent is weaker at
this part. At present, there are more and more small companies spring up. More and
more instant massagers or apps are launched. And Tencent released WeChat for competition. But their function is so close that the
whole market is close to saturation. This is undoubtedly a huge challenge for Tencent
at this moment.
Tencent,
Inc. was founded in November, 1998. It has grown into China’s largest and most
used Internet service portal. During company's development, Tencent has maintained
steady growth under its user-oriented operating strategies. On June 16, 2004,
Tencent Holdings Limited (SEHK 700) went public on the main board of the Hong
Kong Stock Exchange. The headquarter of Tenccent, Inc. is located in Nanshan
district, Shenzhen, China.
Ma Hua Teng (Mr. Ma), current CEO of Tencent, Inc., accompanied with his classmates officially registered a company called Shenzhen Tencent computer system Inc. This company's main business is to expand wireless network paging systems at that time. But before that, in 1997, Mr. Ma got an opportunity to contact ICQ and became one of its users. He personally felt the charm of ICQ, as well as the limitations of this product. First, ICQ only had English version; second, ICQ had the problem of operation difficulty. It made ICQ domestic use broad, but still not particularly widespread in China. Therefore, Mr. Ma and his friends decided to develop Chinese version ICQ software. Tencent, Inc. officially launched Tencent QQ In February, 1999, which is an instant messenger and became the most famous product of Tencent company.
In the aspect of marketing philosophie, Tencent is providing value-added Internet, mobile and telecom services and online advertising under the strategic goal of providing users with "one-stop online lifestyle services". Tencent’s leading Internet platforms in China – QQ (QQ Instant Messenger), QQ.com, QQ Games, Qzone, 3g.QQ.com, SoSo, PaiPai and Tenpay – have brought together China's largest Internet community, to meet the various needs of Internet users including communication, information, entertainment, e-commerce and others. As of Sep 30, 2011, the active QQ users accounts for QQ IM amounted to 711.7 million while its peak concurrent users reach 145.4 million.
Tencent,
Inc. focuses on what its customers want and the marketing needs. It shows on
the company’s mission: to enhance people's quality of life through Internet
services. To treat the Internet like electricity: a reliable service that makes
life easier and more enjoyable. To address the diverse needs of different
regions and consumers by offering differentiated products and services. To build
a healthy and win-win Internet ecology based on open collaboration with
partners. Consumer value as first priority, as it shows in Tencent’s website. Focusing
on the long-term development of the company by putting consumer value above short-term
commercial interests. Developing a deep understanding of consumer needs in
order to provide the most satisfying products and services. Communicating
candidly with consumers, respect their feelings, and grow with their evolving
needs.
Tencent,
Inc. treats its employees like a family. Company provides employees with
comfortable working environments and attractive incentives. They coach and
encourage employees to achieve success in work based on the attitudes of trust
and respect. Company considered employees as its most precious asset and
emphasized on the training of employees. They will offer different kinds of
trainings to different employees depend on their positions.
