While Alibaba and its charismatic founder tend to eat up a lot of the Western press when it comes to Chinese eCommerce and its national explosion, Tencent has quietly been growing an ever-larger and more global footprint — and a bigger valuation to go along with it.
The operator of China’s largest social network and gaming company, Tencent reported a big breakthrough last week with the announcement that it will be making its first extension outside of China with the coming-soon Malaysian debut of its WeChat ecosystem.
The expansion and the netting of an ePayment license in Malaysia for local transactions puts Tencent in more direction competition with the Alibaba Group as both firms push to grab up extra-China marketshare.
Tencent managed to become the first Asian firm to hit a market cap of $500 billion — and on Tuesday, it surpassed Facebook in market value.
“Malaysia is actually quite large in the sense that we have 20 million WeChat users, huge potential, and the market is quite warm towards internet products from China,” Tencent’s President Martin Lau said.
WeChat Pay and Alibaba’s Alipay currently dominate the Chinese payment landscape. Both are also looking to expand to the global stage — though thus far, that effort has mostly been about supporting Chinese consumers shopping and traveling abroad.
The expansion into local payment, services, however, is new and goes hand in hand with efforts on the part of both firms to expand their connections to local markets and local transactions. Alipay’s parent company Ant Financial has joint ventures in seven markets for local digital payments services.
Their goals remain different — Alipay is directly payments and transaction-generation focused, while Tencent is more directly concerned with increasing traffic on the WeChat network.
“We walk our own path at our own pace…and, to be honest, there is really quite a lot to do in China,” Lau said.
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