Tencent focuses on its business customers



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Tencent unveiled its first restructuring in six years – and only the third in almost two decades of existence – after a difficult year in which the share price of the Chinese technology group fell by about a third compared to the January summit .

Welcoming the reorganization as "a new starting point for Tencent's next 20 years," founder and CEO Pony Ma called it a "very important strategic upgrade." In a statement, he said the company would use technology as a driver to explore the next generation of social convergence and content in the era of artificial intelligence and 5G.

The redesign brings together platforms and social content, other than games, and creates a new business and industrial customer-driven unit – a departure for the highly consumer-centric technology conglomerate.

This comes as expectations that Beijing will resume the process of approving commercial gaming licenses in September have not materialized. Licenses allowing businesses to earn money with video games have been suspended since March, in part because of a redesign of regulatory bureaucracy.

The game is the biggest cash engine of Tencent, one of China's two most valuable companies, and the freeze on the commercial launch of new games has contributed to a rare drop in profits in the last quarter.

Tencent has implemented a number of measures to appease Beijing, which has criticized the company's largest turnover. Honor of kings online gambling as an addiction, and fears that excessive gambling will not hurt the children's sight.

In response, Tencent has limited the time children spend on games and, more recently, has launched a pilot program using facial recognition for random checks to ensure that children do not try to get around them. the limits by connecting with adult IDs.

The decision to focus more on business customers follows the path taken by rival Alibaba, who flew early in the process of deploying cloud and cloud services to business customers. Last quarter, Alibaba's cloud business generated revenue of $ 710 million, although it has not yet reached its break-even point. After the Alibaba game book, Tencent has set up a more centralized technology committee.

Tencent said the reorganization was a response to the convergence of content and social platforms, a long-standing trend in television and other media.

"We need to stay awake, crisis-conscious and forward-looking, to bring Tencent into the next era," Martin Lau, president, said in a statement.

The Platform and Content group will be the largest of Tencent's six units, compared to seven previously, with 11,000 employees. There will be no redundancies as a result of the reshuffle, Tencent said.

Tencent's ubiquitous WeChat platform has more than one billion accounts – some users have more than one account – and has become a great application that Chinese citizens use throughout the day to write to, order meals and massages, watching movies and playing games.

To keep users engaged longer in their ecosystem, Tencent has invested more resources in creating content banks, from sports movies to Hollywood movies, to videos of eaten vloggers or to make-up tips.

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