King of Capital

Chapter 37 WeChat - Instant Messaging
Monday, June 6th, Beijing time.

The early morning sunlight shines through the bright windows into every corner of the room, and the cool air from the air conditioner slowly blows away the stuffy summer air.

In the small conference room, the glass whiteboard was covered with handwriting. Su He leaned against the table with his hands folded on his chest, looking dazed. Shen Xin and three other senior male VPs stared at the computer with their eyes wide open after staying up all night, and frequently picked up various refreshing drinks at hand and drank them.

This scene instantly made the interns, who had taken a short break over the weekend and were mentally prepared to fight hard this week, lose confidence.

"It looks like this week will be the turn for the M&A business assessment. It's going to be difficult." Qi Tian was the first to surrender.

Feng Shuo asked thoughtfully, "Boss Xie, is there anything you can reveal?"

"It has nothing to do with you, just do what you need to do." Xie Jingxing replied vaguely.

The interns hurried to eat breakfast and go to the toilet, as they might be suddenly notified to hold a morning meeting sometime later.

Xie Jing Xing knocked on the door of the conference room carrying a large bag of breakfast, walked in and asked with concern: "How is it going? How's the progress?"

"Take a rest first, go out, wash your face and eat something." Su He instructed Shen Xin and others to leave the office.

Blizzard, Airbnb, Alibaba, Ctrip.

The huge glass whiteboard is occupied by famous Internet upstarts, such as Alibaba, which wants to enter the gaming business, and the marriage between online travel giants...

Based on the two key words "Internet" and "cross-border mergers and acquisitions", Su He evaluated all the M&A projects he could think of.

——Tencent.

Xie Jingxing found the name he wanted to see in the corner of the whiteboard, nodded with satisfaction and asked: "Are these people all the members of the team?"

"Core members." Su He explained concisely.

At present, the development level of domestic M&A business is just in its infancy. CICC, a respected company in the financial industry, did not establish its M&A department until 05, not to mention other securities firms.

In recent years, there have been very few mergers and acquisitions projects that have been completed by domestic capital going overseas, and almost all of them were undertaken by foreign investment banks.

Therefore, the M&A departments of domestic securities companies are composed of only a few big cats and small cats. When a job is received, the entire investment bank department will join in to do the job. There is currently no mature and complete M&A team in China.

Everyone works in this mode, a huge makeshift team.

Xie Jingxing didn't expect Su He to really guess the target customer. Rather than testing the team's ability, it was more like sharpening the knife before the battle to feel the intensity of the work. By the way, he wanted to retaliate against the little tricks that this old woman had used against him before, and test his obedience. After all, it was important to take the lead in the project next.

"So is there a real goal here?" Su He got to the point.

Xie Jingxing took out his mobile phone and opened the Tencent News interface. It was an investment news introduction: On June 6rd, Eastern Time, Snap, the parent company of the chat application Snapchat, completed a $23 million Series B financing, with a valuation of $6000 million.

The round was led by renowned venture capital firm IVP, followed by Benchmark Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Tencent.

Su He looked up suddenly: "Tencent?!"

"Potential buyer Tencent, seller..."

"Wait, don't say anything."

Su He interrupted with a pause gesture, frowned and thought for a long time, gritted his teeth and said: "The seller is WhatsApp?"

"Congratulations, you got it right." Xie Jingxing gave a thumbs up in approval.

Su He was so angry that he laughed, his chest heaving as he barely controlled his anger and commented, "You're sick." "Internet industry, cross-border mergers and acquisitions, hundreds of billions of dollars, I didn't lie to you, did I?" Xie Jingxing shrugged and spread his hands.

"Okay, you go out first."

Su He clenched her fists and banged on the table to emphasize that she was too lazy to say anything more.

This was also her mistake at work. She shouldn't have had such high expectations for a rich second-generation who had only been working for a week, even if he seemed to be performing well.

"You've spent an entire evening, you should at least listen to me."

Xie Jingxing picked up the eraser and lightly wiped away the hard work of several people throughout the night. With a rustling sound, the oil-based pen exuded a faint smell of alcohol and left a sentence on the blackboard.

[As for Tencent, the only product that I see that can go global is WeChat.]

Su He fell into deep thought again and her emotions calmed down a little. She vaguely remembered this sentence, which was Mr. Ma’s speech at the Pengcheng IT Leaders Summit at the end of March this year.

In 2009, Sina became the first portal website in China to launch the microblog function. Eight months later, in May 2010, Tencent Weibo opened for registration, entering the market with a huge number of QQ users and huge amounts of capital, declaring war on all portal websites.

NetEase Weibo and Sohu Weibo were swept out before even one round. Liu Xiang's Tencent Weibo followers exceeded 8 million in seven months, ranking first in the world.

However, Thunder swept through Sina Weibo and remained standing. The two sides fought to the end, and President Ma once launched a general mobilization within the company for a decisive battle.

As a result, in the following year, after WeChat emerged and its average daily registered users exceeded 200,000, the decisive battle mysteriously disappeared. This massive commercial war ended with the Tencent Weibo project team quietly disbanding and Sina Weibo being renamed Weibo and successfully listed.

A few years later, Mr. Ma explained the anticlimactic plot: because of WeChat, the "Weibo" war ended.

The root of all this lies in "user traffic". Sina Weibo's built-in chat function hits Tencent's Achilles' heel, or more specifically, instant messaging, QQ's hundreds of millions of users.

The core significance of Tencent Weibo is to maintain user traffic, so when the heaven-defying product WeChat appeared, the war naturally ended.

Up to now and even more than a decade later, there is no instant messaging product more powerful than WeChat. Tencent has seized the user traffic pool and got a ticket to the mobile Internet era.

So now that WeChat has ascended the throne in China, Mr. Ma has turned his attention to the world.

Tencent's gaming, finance, and entertainment businesses will all use WeChat's hundreds of millions of users as a vehicle to expand overseas with unstoppable momentum.

WeChat, the instant messaging app, is Tencent’s sharpest spear and strongest shield. All challengers must bow down and stand at attention before the throne of WeChat.

"Tencent is gradually increasing its investment in Southeast Asia because of WeChat. The annual marketing cost of the overseas version of WeChat is as high as tens of billions. Messi is its global spokesperson, and Neymar uses it to contact his family."

As Xie Jingxing spoke, he wrote down three sets of numbers on the whiteboard with his backhand: "As an international instant messaging product, snap's user growth rate in half a year is 150%, and 1000 million+ users send 2 million photos per day on average."

"Why do you think Tencent invested in Snap?"

He gave the answer without waiting for an answer: "Tencent wants to spend $20 billion to acquire Snap to pave the way for WeChat's globalization. However, the facts have proved that this road is not feasible. Snap only regards Tencent as an idiot and wants to slaughter it!"

"Mr. Su, please tell me. Under such circumstances, why can't WhatsApp, an instant messaging product with 2.5 million daily active users, 5 million downloads, and more than 200 billion messages sent daily, become a target for Tencent's acquisition?"

Xie Jingxing knocked hard on the whiteboard.

Su He was speechless for a long time, and after calming down, he avoided answering: "Some of the data you mentioned are not public."

"So, can we convince Tencent with these undisclosed data?" Xie Jingxing laughed.

(End of this chapter)