Exclusive | Tencent seeks to kill silo culture that gave it WeChat as it expands into AI, big data

Tencent Holdings executives have told employees that the company’s silo culture, which helped create its hugely successful WeChat product, will need to change to a more collaborative approach if it is to succeed in the future in areas such as artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud computing.

The Shenzhen-based company aims to break up in-house fiefdoms and promote more cooperation across different groups as part of a business restructuring that has set the direction of the company for the next two decades.

“It is widely agreed that the current situation of different groups doing their own thing should change,” Tencent chief operating officer Mark Ren Yuxin said in an internal meeting attended by chairman Pony Ma Huateng on Friday, according to a person familiar with the proceedings. “The key leaders in different teams have to cooperate with each other.”

Internal competition, a concept known as horse racing in the company, is credited with giving birth to Tencent’s now dominant messaging app WeChat – its most successful product with more than 1 billion users – but has also created silos that hamper the sharing of data, ideas and even lines of codes.

“We have to make technology collaboration a [new] company culture,” Dowson Tong, president of Tencent’s newly established Cloud and Smart Industries Group, told the same meeting. “We currently have difficulties achieving cooperation and collaboration but have to set a target and make it happen in the coming three to five years. Ten years from now, I hope people will talk about our culture of sharing lines of code just like people talk about Silicon Valley culture.”

In Tencent’s latest business revamp announced in late September, the company formed a technology committee that will create an internal platform to share fundamental technologies within the company and apply them to different industries. The approach is designed to help Tencent build an ecosystem for providing new technologies such as cloud computing, big data and AI tools to industries undergoing digital transformation.