Internet services company Tencent Holdings Ltd (騰訊) has grown so rapidly it is now China’s most valuable listed technology brand, with a value even closing in on that of Wal-Mart Stores Inc, a report published yesterday shows.
The Tencent brand is worth about US$33.9 billion, even though it is almost unknown outside its home turf, according to an annual ranking of China’s listed companies compiled by advertising company WPP PLC and its research affiliate, Millward Brown.
Global retailer Wal-Mart was valued at US$36 billion in this year’s WPP-Millward Brown global ranking, published in May.
Photo: Reuters
The annual rankings, based on analysis of a brand’s revenue and consumer responses to it, make Tencent the first technology company to break into the top three of China’s most valuable brands.
The Chinese ranking only covers the country’s publicly traded companies, which means high-profile technology brands, like mobile phone maker Huawei Technologies Co (華為) and e-commerce company Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (阿里巴巴), were not counted. Alibaba is widely expect to go public as early as next year.
Tencent, whose two-year-old voice and text messaging service WeChat now boasts almost 275 million active monthly users, is popular with Chinese consumers for its online games and social media applications, Millward Brown China head of branding Doreen Wang (王幸) said.
Tencent ranked third overall in the China list, trailing mobile telecommunications provider China Mobile Ltd (中國移動) with a brand value of US$61.4 billion, and Industrial and Commercial Bank of China Ltd (中國工商銀行), worth US$39.6 billion.
Last year, Tencent ranked fifth, but leapfrogged China Construction Bank Corp (中國建設銀行) and Internet search engine Baidu Inc (百度) as its brand value rose 68 percent.
“It’s not an international brand yet,” Wang said. “Tencent is still getting most of its brand equity from its home market in China.”
“Alibaba is the e-commerce [brand] we really want to evaluate,” said Wang, adding that Huawei would “probably already rank the No. 1 in the brand list” if it were included.
China’s technology brands are increasingly competing on the world stage. Tencent was ranked No. 21 on the WPP-Millward Brown global list in May, with Baidu at 25. China Mobile dropped to 10th place worldwide this year, down from fourth in 2006, when it was ranked just under Coca-Cola Co.
Though growing, China’s brands frequently remain obscure outside their home territory. Consultancy firm Interbrand, which also ranks the value of global brands, has no Chinese companies on its top 100 list, in part because the ranking requires brands to get at least 30 percent of their revenue from outside their home region.
Computer maker Lenovo Group Ltd (聯想), which ranked 24th on the China list, is the only Chinese brand with more than half of its revenue coming from overseas, the WPP report said.
China’s top chipmaker has warned that breakaway spending on artificial intelligence (AI) chips is bringing forward years of future demand, raising the risk that some data centers could sit idle. “Companies would love to build 10 years’ worth of data center capacity within one or two years,” Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯) cochief executive officer Zhao Haijun (趙海軍) said yesterday on a call with analysts. “As for what exactly these data centers will do, that hasn’t been fully thought through.” Moody’s Ratings projects that AI-related infrastructure investment would exceed US$3 trillion over the next five years, as developers pour eye-watering sums
Bank of America Corp nearly doubled its forecast for the nation’s economic growth this year, adding to a slew of upgrades even after a rip-roaring last year propelled by demand for artificial intelligence (AI). The firm lifted its projection to 8 percent from 4.5 percent on “relentless global demand” for the hardware that Taiwanese companies make, according to a note dated yesterday by analysts including Xiaoqing Pi (皮曉青). Taiwan’s GDP expanded 8.63 percent last year, the fastest pace since 2010. The increase “reflects our sustained optimism over Taiwan’s technology driven expansion and is reinforced by several recent developments,” including a more stable currency,
NEW IMPORTS: Car dealer PG Union Corp said it would consider introducing US-made models such as the Jeep Grand Cherokee and Stellantis’ RAM 1500 to Taiwan Tesla Taiwan yesterday said that it does not plan to cut its car prices in the wake of Washington and Taipei signing the Agreement on Reciprocal Trade on Thursday to eliminate tariffs on US-made cars. On the other hand, Mercedes-Benz Taiwan said it is planning to lower the price of its five models imported from the US after the zero tariff comes into effect. Tesla in a statement said it has no plan to adjust the prices of the US-made Model 3, Model S and Model X as tariffs are not the only factor the automaker uses to determine pricing policies. Tesla said
OpenAI has warned US lawmakers that its Chinese rival DeepSeek (深度求索) is using unfair and increasingly sophisticated methods to extract results from leading US artificial intelligence (AI) models to train the next generation of its breakthrough R1 chatbot, a memo reviewed by Bloomberg News showed. In the memo, sent on Thursday to the US House of Representatives Select Committee on China, OpenAI said that DeepSeek had used so-called distillation techniques as part of “ongoing efforts to free-ride on the capabilities developed by OpenAI and other US frontier labs.” The company said it had detected “new, obfuscated methods” designed to evade OpenAI’s defenses
RSS