Chinese tech company Tencent is a gaming giant and the parent company of China’s ubiquitous social messaging app WeChat.
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SINGAPORE — Chinese tech giant Tencent is increasingly leveraging its WeChat super app ecosystem to differentiate itself from dominant global cloud service players, said Tencent Cloud CEO Dawson Tong.
Tong told CNBC on the sidelines of the recent annual Singapore Fintech Festival that more clients are interested in engaging in the creation of their own SuperApps, a service Tencent Cloud offers by sharing its technology and operational experience. He established the WeChat ecosystem. .
“That’s what makes us stand out from the crowd. [other] online platforms,” Tong said. Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform are the three largest cloud service providers. It accounts for 68 percent of the market share. As of the second quarter of this year, according to Synergy Research Group.
Superapp platforms are often developed using cloud infrastructure to provide scalability, reliability, and efficient resource management.
Tong shared that many of Tencent’s cloud services clients are willing to build their own mini-programs on WeChat’s network to attract existing users of the super app to their services.
“Many of our enterprise customers … want to have some of the technologies that make our customer service successful. They also want to take advantage of our ability to connect with customers,” Tong said.
The company shared that the financial and government sectors make up the majority of this interest pool. For example, Canada Bank of Cambodia partnered with Tencent Cloud to launch a new mobile banking app in 2023.
A super app is an application that acts as a one-stop shop for multiple offerings — from messaging to payment transactions to ordering food, among other services. WeChat is the biggest super app in the world.to boast About 1.3 billion active monthly usersor about 90% of China’s total population.
While global rivals Amazon, Google and Microsoft offer many services to their clients, these are typically spread across multiple platforms and applications rather than being available on a universal platform like WeChat.
For example, Amazon specializes in e-commerce, cloud services, and streaming, but it doesn’t have a single app that integrates these services. Similarly, Microsoft offers enterprise solutions such as Office 365 and gaming, but it lacks a comprehensive super app for consumers. Google provides search, email, cloud services and the Android OS, but each service is accessed individually.
Amazon specializes in e-commerce, cloud services, and streaming, namely Prime Video, but it doesn’t have a single app that integrates these services together.
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In 2022, Microsoft Allegedly A super app was considered, which would include messaging, web search functions, news and shopping, however, there has been no official statement or follow-up from the company on the report.
While Tencent’s SuperApp ecosystem is unique, it may not be the most in the cloud space, said Wei Sun, principal analyst in the artificial intelligence team at Counterpoint Research.
“In the cloud industry, super apps are not central to service offerings. Cloud clients prioritize infrastructure reliability, scalability, security, and compliance over integrated user-facing applications,” Sun said.
He added that while super apps can increase user engagement and data collection, these functions do not directly affect the core services demanded by cloud clients.
However, Sun acknowledged that there is “definitely a lot of added value” to having a super app that can aggregate this pyramid of integrated user data to grow users. Data flywheelWhere the more data the system collects, the more value can be extracted.
The absence of a super app among the three cloud giants could also be due to different regulatory concerns and market dynamics in the West, where specialized apps are preferred over all-in-one solutions, he said.
Superapps have gained massive popularity in Asia.With Gojek and Grab — in addition to WeChat — a testament to their growing popularity.
The global superapps market was valued at $61.30 billion in 2022 and is expected to expand at a compound annual growth rate of approximately 30% between 2023 and 2030. According to a research reportwhich potentially increases the appeal among superapp developers for the cloud services offered by Tencent.
Leveraging its SuperApp expertise, Tong said Tencent Cloud’s proactive integration of clients’ public cloud resources with on-premise private resources is also something that helps them become competitive against international cloud providers. helps, which he said focuses on the public. the cloud
In a public cloud, many users use a shared set of computing resources, such as servers, storage, and networking infrastructure. Having on-premise private resources means that companies can store their data centers in their own facilities and manage them independently without sharing them with other clients.
While Amazon and Microsoft offer hybrid cloud options, Counterpoint’s Sun suggested that Tencent’s uniqueness may be in the company’s ability to offer on-premise solutions tailored to client needs in the Chinese market, particularly in social media. , customizing for entertainment, video and gaming. correction
“This gives its super app WeChat a further edge, which moves upwards,” he added.
