Finally catching up on some reading: Bloomberg published an excellent profile on Tencent and the co’s strategist, Martin Lau. I highly recommend the article as it not only goes through the history of the company, but reveals the type of thinking and mentality that has helped Tencent become one of the most successful companies in the world.
For the uninitiated, Tencent is one of the “BAT” trinity (Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent) that dominate the Chinese tech space. The Chinese are increasingly living their lives in a “digital-first” manner, and as a result, BAT’s influence extends across nearly all aspects of Chinese life in a way that Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple can only wish (and try to replicate with limited success thus far). All three players operate across nearly all verticals including social, video/entertainment, e-commerce, search, browsers, app stores, delivery, cloud services, payments, finance, and many more. They have gone beyond being just software/service companies to essentially digital lifestyle companies.
Despite the BAT moniker, investors view the strengths of each company quite differently.
Generally, Baidu (the company with search as its core strength) is viewed as the weakest. Unlike Google’s dominance in the US, Baidu has struggled to find its place in China’s highly digitized mobile world were users largely spend their time in Tencent or Alibaba’s walled gardens. Whereas Google has been able to run its search crawlers through the open internet and through the Android platform (majority global share), Baidu does not have the luxury of a dominant mobile platform nor access to the increasingly large amounts of data that is generated outside of the browser.
Of the remaining two, Alibaba and Tencent are generally neck-and-neck. Alibaba absolutely dominates in e-commerce and payments/finance while Tencent owns the incredibly sticky WeChat messaging super-app with a fast growing payments solution. Nonetheless, investors overwhelmingly consider Tencent to be a much stronger business with a 1yr forward P/E of 45x to Alibaba’s 34x despite similar growth rates according to consensus estimates. The difference in perception largely comes down to the fact that investors consider WeChat to be mostly un-disruptable while Alibaba is currently contending with a sizable #2 player in JD.
However, I believe that perception is misplaced especially when we consider Tencent’s and Alibaba’s prospects for going global.
The Bloomberg article mentioned above highlights the challenges that Tencent faces in trying to export its WeChat model abroad:
Then there’s the matter of Facebook Inc. and WhatsApp, which have a huge market advantage pretty much everywhere outside China. Going overseas, Lau says, “is essentially the challenge of every Chinese company. We tried to make WeChat international. The reality was that there were other products in the market already.”
Tencent faces a much more formidable competitor in Facebook as they try to expand abroad, while the global e-commerce landscape is much more benign for Alibaba. E-commerce is much more fragmented on a global scale, and Amazon is nowhere near as dominant on a global scale as Facebook is for social networking.
The valuation gap between the two companies only make sense in a China-specific context. In a global context, why should that gap exist?
Disclosure: I have no direct beneficial interest in Tencent (700 HK) or Alibaba (BABA) as of publishing date and have no intent to initiate a position within the next 48 hours.
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