The most famous copycat in China — Tencent
Tencent is one of the biggest companies in the Internet industry, with more than 700 million user base according to its office site. However, it is widely notorious for its “strategy” in copying products from others in almost every category of the mobile and internet applications. Examples of products of well-known companies being copied are Facebook, eBay and etc. What interested me is that the Tencent’s profit for the first half year in 2012 was two billion Yuan (312,420,000.00 CAD) which was a 54.3% increase compared to that in 2011.
I think there are mainly three reasons for its success. Firstly, Tencent was established as early as 1998, leading to its huge user base; at least all of my friends in China use QQ, which is the major product developed by Tencent. Secondly, many famous companies like Facebook are kept out of the China market, so, to some extent, Tencent becomes these companies for Chinese users. More importantly, Tencent did many improvements and modifications to the products it copied, and most of the products are free!
In all, I’m not really supporting this behavior because it’s not ethically right by stealing other people’s works, but I think Tencent has done a great job in positioning itself in the market, with low costs and risks.
Related links:
1. http://www.biztechday.com/china-tencent-copycat/
2. http://www.tencent.com/zh-cn/content/ir/rp/2012/attachments/201201.pdf