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at present, the global economy is weak and the industry is intensifying. seeking a second growth curve has become a common consensus among companies. there is no doubt that how to reshape growth in the face of adversity has become a must-answer question for every company. seeking new growth against the trend is to find a solution to the dilemma and a path for development.

as a cloud service provider, one of tencent cloud's growth drivers comes from helping enterprises unlock new growth codes.

"the problems faced by partners are basically similar to those faced by our cloud vendors. the traditional pan-internet market has become saturated and growth is slow." recently, li qiang, vice president of tencent group and president of government business, said in an interview with the media, including the reporter of "daily economic news", that in the face of fierce market competition, we should not focus on friendly competitors, but more on the big environment and find new opportunities. it is more important to form a second growth curve than to compete in a red ocean market. whether it is tencent cloud itself or promoting the growth of partners, it hopes to enter more industries and sinking markets.

in addition, the change in the overseas business model has also brought opportunities for enterprises to participate in global competition and find new market growth points, and has also brought an increase in demand for cloud computing. in the pan-internet industry including games and entertainment, tencent cloud's overseas business growth rate in the first half of 2024 exceeded 70%.

give a bigger "cake" to partners

tencent's q2 2024 financial report shows that the total revenue for the quarter was 161.1 billion yuan, an increase of 8% year-on-year. among them, the revenue of enterprise services business achieved double-digit growth. as of now, the number of partners has exceeded 11,000, and the total number of customers served together has exceeded 2 million. in the past three years, the number of partners with revenue exceeding one million yuan has increased by 150%; in the past two years, the revenue of tencent conference partners has increased by 355%.

yang chen, vice president of tencent cloud and head of industry ecosystem cooperation, said that pursuing ecological prosperity is the goal of tencent cloud, but quantity is not the only goal of ecological prosperity, and the quality of the ecosystem is relatively more important. especially in today's relatively challenging market environment, from tencent's own perspective, the focus is still on polishing products, practicing internal skills, and working with partners to improve the service capabilities of client expansion and operation, which is the fundamental.

for a long time, tencent cloud's idea of ​​b2b ecological cooperation has been to give "half of its life" to its partners. tencent cloud vice president wu qisheng pointed out that in the coming year, tencent will maintain an open mind and give "half of its life" to its partners without any change: "in the past, we have made some corresponding adjustments, and we have given some resources to some partners we think are valuable, and we have cleared out some partners who are not doing well. in the future, we will not focus on the number of 11,000 companies, but on having an evaluation mechanism so that partners can make money here and grow our business together. this is the core concept."

in an interview with a reporter from the "daily economic news", li qiang pointed out that tencent's genes are to pay great attention to win-win cooperation with partners and the ecosystem, and this win-win situation can be seen in the introduction of policies and the intensity of support for partners, which are completely different from those of its market peers. tencent rarely introduces policies that impact its partners, but instead provides more support to partners to expand their markets.

"we are determined, not just slogans. we have cut off a lot of integration, delivery, consulting, and customized development businesses, and these businesses are actually handed over to partners to do. there is a bigger 'cake' for partners to make this ecosystem more prosperous." li qiang added that tencent cloud is supporting partners and helping them to transform, not just cloud-native companies, because cloud-native companies are slowly entering the stock market and new industries. tencent cloud helps them with training and empowerment, and jointly develops industry solutions, supports them to open new institutions in the sinking market, and tencent cloud also recruits local partners in the sinking market to participate in the tencent ecosystem process. as time goes by, this situation becomes more and more obvious.

the growth rate of cloud computing sinking market has exceeded that of developed regions

there are more than 50 million enterprises in china (according to data at the end of 2023, the number of enterprises among china's market entities is 58.268 million). these enterprises were difficult for many manufacturers, including tencent cloud, to directly cover in the past. they may be spread across china's first-tier, second-tier, third-tier, and fourth-tier cities, so sinking has become an inevitable trend.

li qiang pointed out that the revenue scale of developed regions still accounts for the majority of tencent cloud, but the growth rate of the sinking market is very fast, which can bring good growth expectations to the market. both the stock of cloud in developed regions and the stock of early cloud native customers have gradually entered the stock market. although the sinking market is relatively small in size compared with developed regions, its growth rate far exceeds that of developed regions.

"so even companies in the lower-tier markets are aware that cloud computing is a great way to reduce costs for businesses. so we see very positive feedback from the lower-tier markets, and we will continue to invest firmly in this area," said li qiang.

in addition to the large growth potential, the lower-tier markets also have better profitability than the top customers. li qiang observed from the share of public cloud that the proportion of public cloud revenue of the top large enterprises is still relatively large. however, for customers in the mid- and long-tail markets, although the average customer price of a partner may be only a few thousand to tens of thousands of yuan per year, their profitability may be much higher than that of the top customers. moreover, they adopt online telemarketing, which has relatively low costs and can reach a scale of nearly 1 billion yuan.

therefore, li qiang also admitted to reporters that the number of chinese companies is extremely large, and the power of the medium and long tail is very strong. as time goes by, this potential will also support the partners' business to grow bigger and bigger.

there is still a long way to go for large models to be commercialized

the demand for cloud computing brought about by large ai models, especially the demand for intelligent computing power, is very clear. this has become one of the important growth engines for cloud computing vendors in the past period of time.

in li qiang's opinion, big models are better used in scenarios with relatively high fault tolerance, such as knowledge management, marketing, customer service, code, intelligent risk control, etc. in addition to the big model itself, a stable and high-performance ai infrastructure is particularly important, which can truly help customers implement technology in business scenarios at low cost and low threshold, bringing the optimal solution for efficiency and cost.

at present, tencent has built a full-link ai big model product matrix, created more than 20 industry big models, covering more than 50 industries. on september 5, tencent announced the launch of a new generation of big models "hunyuan turbo". compared with the previous generation model, tencent hunyuan turbo has significantly improved its performance, with training efficiency increased by 108%, reasoning efficiency increased by 100%, reasoning cost reduced by 50%, and decoding speed increased by 20%.

currently, tencent hunyuan provides model services of various sizes on tencent cloud, which are fully open to enterprises and individual developers through access and usage methods such as api, exclusive models, and fine-tuned models.

"in fact, the commercialization of big models on the b side is far from being as prosperous as everyone thinks. in b-side applications, the industry barriers are relatively deep. secondly, chinese businesses have relatively high requirements for the confidentiality of their own industry data. those who have truly set up core businesses are more willing to do it in a private deployment form. but when the privatization route is truly taken, it will in turn affect the combination of big models with the industry, especially replication and promotion. this has in some sense formed today's bottleneck." li qiang added that in some complex applications, big models may not have met the requirements of traditional industries, but tencent has been making many powerful attempts. overall, there is still a long way to go for the commercialization of big models.

daily economic news