Explainer | How Tencent missed its chance to join the trillion-dollar club: a brief history
- Tencent’s share price has dropped more than 37 per cent since the beginning of the year
- China’s Big Tech have been almost continually battered this year by an ongoing crackdown with no end in sight
Starting in July, the Shenzhen-based company has seen a merger deal blocked, been ordered to end its exclusive music licencing deals with global record labels, and suspended new user registrations on its super app, WeChat.
Since the beginning of the year, its share price has gone from a high of HK$767 (US$98.70) in January to HK$446 by market close on August 3, a drop of almost 42 per cent, after a now-deleted article from state-owned media condemned video games as “spiritual opium”.
Here is a fresh look at how Tencent got to where it is today and the challenges it faces.
How did Tencent begin?
It all began in 1998 in a small office in Huaqiangbei, a district in China’s southern tech hub of Shenzhen known for its sprawling electronics markets.
The country’s internet industry was just starting to take off. The number of web users had ballooned to more than 2 million from a paltry 1,600 just four years earlier.