Name: Ma Vs. Ma: The Battle for Internet Supremacy
Uploaded: 2018-06-21
Duration: 4 min 37 s
Description: Jack Ma runs Alibaba, Pony Ma runs Tencent.

Jack Ma is the Executive Chairman and Founder of the Alibaba Group which is China's largest e- commerce company. Pony Ma is the CEO and Founder of Tencent, which is China's largest gaming and messaging company. And now these two massively powerful, extremely well run, and fast grown Chinese Internet companies are in direct competition with each other. And what's interesting about these companies is how much they have in common, and how different they are. Both are half a trillion dollar market capitalization companies that are far and away the two leaders of the Chinese Internet industry and each is dominant in what it does. Ali Baba is a commerce and then later a payments company, Tencent is a gaming and then messaging company through its extremely popular WeChat service. People very frequently compare Alibaba to Amazon but that's a poor comparison, it's more like eBay in that Alibaba doesn't hold inventory, it is a platform for selling merchandize, it's really an advertising Platform, not a retailer. Tencent people want to compare to Facebook. It's far more like a combination of Activision, Blizzard and other publishers of Games and Facebook and PayPal, and a very large investment bank as well The two top guys could not be more different from each other. Jack Ma of Alibaba, is a gregarious, globe- trotting business celebrity who speaks excellent English, well- known throughout the world, has a true gift for gab in two languages, and is sort of a visionary, outspoken leader for Alibaba. Pony Ma, by contrast, is a reserved, Introverted, quiet, steely engineer who rarely gives interviews to the Western media, and not so much to the Chinese media either. And now where things get really interesting, this Story of ma versus ma is that the two are starting to increasingly become competitive with each other, largely because Ten Cent, through We Chat, has started to facilitate online payments. Well, payments is what Alibaba's strength was in through its e- commerce platform, where people buy goods from all over the world. Digital payments in China is a whole different ballgame from what people in the west can appreciate. The credit card never really was a big deal in China which has only been a modern industrialized country for the past 20 years or so. So the Chinese went straight to smart phones and Straight to digital payment which is why this has become such a key battle ground for Alibaba which has Alipay and ten cent which has we chat pay. Because of this emphasis on payments both companies have identified retail as a key battleground in China. They're trying to do two things, they're trying to lock in payments partners with these retailers and they're also trying to sell them technology. [ MUSIC ] US business people always wanna know when are Alibaba and Tencent coming to the United States? The short answer is, well, one, they are already here, and that each company, in particular Tencent, has made Many large investments [ MUSIC ] in the United States. In another sense, the answer is, no time soon. Neither company sees a huge advantage in trying to operate in the US market, which is a very mature economy with fierce competitors like Amazon, and Facebook, and Google. They see better opportunity in other Asian countries in particular in South East Asia for example. Which is an immature economy with immature retail. With a fast rising internet culture that is far more like modern China. Then it is like the United States. Alibaba and Tencent are two examples of companies that have been able to build a giant business while having China more or less to themselves in their key areas. But to focus On that too much would be to miss the point that non- Chinese companies and business people have a lot to learn from these innovative companies and that the day may come when they aren't content to operate primarily in China or in Southeast Asia and may well come to North America. We just don't know when that will be. [ MUSIC ] [ BLANK_AUDIO ]

Jack Ma runs Alibaba, Pony Ma runs Tencent.