July 29, 2020
The Chinese online gaming and WeChat giant, Tencent Holdings has just surpassed Facebook to become the world’s most valuable social media network company by market capitalization on Tuesday, July 28. The company is now the seventh-largest company in the world.
Tencent’s market capitalization has just reached $670 billion USD, surpassing Facebook’s $657.8 billion market value.
About two weeks ago, another Chinese company, Alibaba, the Chinese Amazon e-commerce giant ousted Facebook as the world’s sixth most valuable company. Alibaba’s market capitalization skyrocketed to $677.4 billion USD.
This is another blow to American prestige. China’s growing innovation in digital payments, 5G development, online gaming, and e-commerce have spearheaded the latest push from the “Asian Tigers” (China, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan).
Japan’s Toyota Motors is now worth more than General Motors and Ford combined. Samsung and Apple have been battling each other for technological supremacy, with Samsung recently gaining complete control over OLED screen technology, graphene battery development, and 5G to which Samsung now sets the price for Apple. Taiwan’s TSMC also continues to dominate with its 7-nanometer chips while America’s Intel is still struggling to develop a 7-nanometer chip of their own—now five years behind TSMC. The 5-nanometer chip is already being developed by TSMC.
China, South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan have been outpacing all other Western countries in tech and innovation and are projected to surpass the remaining competitors within the next five years. Special emphasis on China.
“With rising China GDP growth, we will see more and more Chinese companies entering the top 10 or top 100 companies,” stated Kenny Wen, wealth management strategist at Everbright Sun Hung Kai. “This long-term trend will continue in the foreseeable future. However, the pandemic and worsening China-US relationship may make the situation complicated,” Wen stated to South China Morning Post.
The sheer magnitude of Tencent is astonishing. Their ecosystem is packed with gaming, social networking, mobile payments, music, videos, and cloud for a population of 1.4 billion people. Just Tencent’s WeChat social media platform, message, and mobile payment apps have more than 1 billion monthly active users. That’s more than double the U.S. population.
“You can barely get through a day without touching one of Tencent’s applications,” said Vey-Sern Ling, senior analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence.
Feature Image via Tech In Asia