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Comment by malanj | Hacker News Reader

As a South African I find the global indifference to Tencent quite strange. They are massive but mostly ignored (compared to e.g. Amazon which has a similar market cap). Tencent are aggressively expanding WeChat into Africa (big billboards everywhere!). They are also running a local development team in South Africa to customise the app for the local market.

Tencent were funded by Naspers, a South African company, so I think we're much more aware of them than most other countries. I've spoken with Koos Bekker, the CEO of Naspers, about Tencent years ago. He said that they work much faster than any US tech company he's every seen.

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Startup News sites tend to live in a bubble where a "Coming Soon" page just hacked together by 2 guys in a cafe in SF is more important than a billion dollar business elsewhere.

That "Coming Soon" page can often provide more ideas and interesting discussion than the billion dollar business.

Don't be contrary just for the sake of it. Tencent is currently dominating the APAC market and that fact alone 'provide[s] more ideas and interesting discussion' than a coming soon page.

I'm also aware that Naspers is developing a lot of content for WeChat, something in the line of channels you can subscribe to or something. I think you can compare it to what Mxit did(or tried to do) years ago, but at that time I believe the tech was not there yet.

I also think they might have a gap in the African market. My gardener has a smart phone. He asks for mp3 and videos and I know he is on Whatsapp. But I don't see Whatsapp trying to supply content yet, might change in the near future with the facebook deal.

If WeChat can get people like him on their platform and supply content to him for a small fee they have a very big market. Also I can see he is willing to spend money. I just wonder how willing is he to spend money on digital content.

Btw, "Hallo" from a fellow South African.

Why do you find it strange? When I load tencent.com I get a blank page (I keep javascript disabled by default) and then when I finally get the page loaded, it loads in Chinese since it didn't detect my language either by HTTP header or by IP. The page looks like the typical boring corporate home page (I can't even tell it's a social network). I then switch to English and I see that tencent.com is not the homepage for the social network, but the parent corporation that owns the social network its responsible for. I can tell this from typical corporate specific stuff like talking about stuff like quarterly earnings and stock performance, their vision ("to be the most respected internet company" ha!) and mission ("to enhance people's quality of life through Internet services". lol). Obviously, there must be some other home page I need to go to in order to join, but I can't tell what it is from the tencent homepage and the tencent name is the only one I'm familiar with as a foreigner so I don't even know what other domain I might put in the address bar or what query I might execute in Google.

With product management like this, they are never going to penetrate beyond China. Thinking they can compete with Facebook here is laughable.

In addition, I think that they are definitely going to be a billion-dollar company and will probably be very popular in South Africa where they have roots, but to ask why people don't know or care about them as much as Amazon, to name the example, seems... well, obvious. I order stuff from Amazon twice a week! I've only ever heard of this company due to its Riot shares. I can see why a South African wouldn't see Amazon as very interesting, though... do you get 2 day shipping out there?

hey, try wechat.com (for the product mentioned by parent)

tencent is the corporate conglomerate and owns QQ, weibo, wechat and others.

QQ has been around for a bit and would be analogous to yahoo (social network, chat, news, email). QQ.com reflects this.

wechat is the new product they are trying to push to the global market.

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