Tencent Trumps Facebook, But What About Its Big India Bets?
Tencent has made key investments in India, considering the Chinese market is fast approaching its saturation point
The first Chinese technology company to join the ranks of the world’s five largest corporations, is shifting its attention to India.
Tencent Holdings Ltd., which surpassed Facebook Inc. in market value, is inching towards a saturation point in its home market. Over the last few years, it has put in billions of dollars into Indian startups. Tencent pumped in nearly $700 million into India’s largest e-commerce player Flipkart earlier this year, besides investing in startups such as Practo, Hike and Ola.
- Tencent invested nearly $55 million in healthcare startup Practo a couple of years ago, according to data analytics website, CrunchBase.
- Messaging platform Hike raised $1.4 billion from investors including Tencent Holdings Ltd. and Foxconn Technology Group last year.
- Ola recently raised $1.1 billion in funding from Tencent and its old investor Softbank Group.
Tencent needs to prepare itself for a situation when its home market growth starts to slow down and India, with its large population, presents a substantial opportunity, independent technology analyst Richard Windsor told BloombergQuint.
“Like China, like Africa, India is going to be a mobile-first market and so people will predominantly always turn to mobile services at first before they try to use internet services on fixed. And this is because in India, mobile is a better place to access the internet compared to developed markets where fixed internet is both faster and more reliable,” he explained.
So, from that perspective, India is a better fit for Tencent than it is for perhaps for Google and Amazon simply because the differences in the market.Richard Windsor, Technology Analyst
Globally, the Shenzhen-based tech company has invested in companies such as WeChat, Snap, ride-sharing app Lyft and electric-vehicle maker Tesla.
