The WSJ had a nice piece breaking down the mega internet companies of the world — of course US leads the pack but Asian companies aren’t doing so shabby either. China is of course leading the ‘Asia’ pack due to sheer population volume. Seriously, file that under no shit Sherlock.
But there were some fun factoids:
- 45% of the world’s nearly 3 billion internet users are in Asia
- WeChat (owned by Tencent) has about 440m users
- Tencent’s profit margin in the second quarter was 32%, compared with 27% at Facebook and 21% at Google.
- Tencent’s stock-market value is $148 billion, compared with Facebook’s $194 billion.
- LINE (Japanese messaging app) had revenue of $323 million, 16 times the estimated revenue of WhatsApp.
…separately, it’s really funny how ‘tech journalists’ don’t seem to understand the products they are writing about. This particular author, said WeChat is WhatsApp’s rival. No. No. No. I can not say this enough times: they are two very different products. WhatsApp is a communication utility – a tool. WeChat is a full fledged platform, an ecosystem.
The author also calls LINE stickers ‘cutesy emoticons’ — which further highlights the lack of understanding of mobile behavior in Asia even after NYT wrote about it!! (Pretty embarrassing).
Oh well. I guess that’s why there is a need for someone like me or Jon Russell of TNW and a dedicated publication like TIA to pipe on about this region.
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