Tencent, one in every of Asia’s most dear corporations with a present market cap of round $460 billion, has launched a brand new motto after co-founder and CEO Pony Ma mentioned this week he wished ‘tech for good’ to be a part of the corporate’s imaginative and prescient and mission sooner or later.
The firm has not but officialized the brand new company philosophy and it’s unclear how the “don’t be evil”-like slogan will manifest in Tencent’s enterprise technique. Nor do we all know if it would exchange the previous mission, which remains to be emblazoned on its web site:
Tencent’s mission is to “improve the quality of life through internet value-added services”. Guided by its “user oriented” enterprise philosophy, Tencent achieves its mission by way of the supply of built-in web options to over 1 billion netizens.
Episodes of current occasions can in all probability present some hints to what the brand new slogan would possibly entail. The previous mission, which focuses on the person consumer relatively than the broader society, has led Tencent to supremacy in video video games and social media; the firm is the operator behind the billion-user messager WeChat and a number of other top-grossing video video games. But these segments of companies are beneath rising strain as China’s altering regulatory atmosphere and business rivals create challenges for the 21-year-old behemoth.
A months-long gaming freeze final 12 months put a squeeze on Tencent’s gaming revenues, wiping billions of {dollars} from its market cap. Rising short-video app Douyin, which is TikTookay’s native model, threatens Tencent’s dominance within the social and content material realms.
To keep aggressive, the corporate underwent a sweeping re-organization final October to position extra give attention to enterprise companies, corresponding to cloud computing and different digital infrastructure for industries starting from finance, healthcare, schooling to authorities providers.
The new focus to improve entrenched industries not solely opens up extra income streams; these sectors additionally present the testing floor for Tencent to place its ‘tech for good’ mission into apply.
As Ma pledged on the government-run business convention Digital China Summit on Monday, Tencent believes “technology can bring benefits to the human race; humans should make good use of technology and refrain from its evil use; and technology should strive to solve the problems it brings to society.”
Ma pointed to a few key areas the place know-how can generate constructive adjustments: conventional industries, the place Tencent may present massive knowledge capabilities to beef up effectivity in manufacturing; authorities items, the place Tencent may leverage its apps to digitize a slew of civil providers corresponding to making use of for visas and renewing drivers’ licenses; and society, which is a broad and arguably obscure definition however has seen efforts like tracing lacking kids utilizing Tencent’s face recognition options.
“Looking at parallels throughout the globe, Google proposed ‘do no evil’ as its code of conduct forward of its preliminary public providing 20 years in the past. I feel this type of elevated mission is proof of the quantity of affect an organization has collected,” Zhong Xin, a former Qualcomm engineer who based the substitute intelligence-powered medical imaging startup 12 Sigma, mentioned to TechCrunch.
“Technology is a double-edged sword. A company needs a guiding principle to determine its proper use, so I believe the purported mission to do good with technology is inevitable,” added Xin.
From the federal government’s standpoint, a company motto that focuses on doing good is clearly music to the ears. Tencent’s new code of conduct comes as China’s tech darlings face mounting public and authorities criticisms for his or her antagonistic influence on society, a motion mirroring Silicon Valley’s tech backlash. The costs vary from video video games’ position in inflicting dangerous eyesight amongst kids, which put Tencent within the crosshairs; to clickbait content material operating rampant on Bytedance’s fashionable information app, Toutiao.
“‘Doing good’…
