
China’s Tencent Buys 12% Stake in Snap - jakarta
https://www.wsj.com/articles/tencent-buys-12-percent-stake-in-developer-of-snapchat-1510143803
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randartie
With TenCent having the pull that they do in China, I wonder if this could
mean Snapchat possibly being unblocked in China soon.

The cynical part of me thinks that when a big purchase like this happens, the
buyer knows something we don’t.

Then again, they bought 5% of Tesla as well this year.

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dmix
I'm surprised it's banned there... how could Snapchat possibly be threatening
to the Chinese government? Are selfy videos really danger to the party? Were
the keyword filters not effective?

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toast0
It's running on Google infra, of course it's banned.

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wiradikusuma
there's an "open source" Google App Engine called AppScale that can run
outside Google Cloud.

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dymk
Managing the software used to run a cloud platform isn't the hardest part of
running a cloud platform. It would be a significantly larger effort for Snap
to run and manage their own physical infrastructure. It's a big reason why
Google Cloud is a service that makes money.

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tarr11
Side note: Tencent means "soaring information" [1] and not "10 cents"

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tencent](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tencent)

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est
> not "10 cents"

It does imply 10 cents. See

[https://www.zhihu.com/question/55269732/answer/145118163](https://www.zhihu.com/question/55269732/answer/145118163)

(This site is basically China's quota, the answerer is Tencent official org
account.)

Basically, Tencent was a startup that charges 10 cents for each message
delivered to pager devices via its OICQ software (网络寻呼机), and later 10 cents
for each SMS message.

Interesting though, Tencent(腾讯) was named after Lucent (朗讯), back in the time
there was like hundreds of messaging companies in ShenZhen named *cent. e.g.
润讯，中讯，捷讯, etc.

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ProAm
Honest question, is Tencent a holding company or a technology company?

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bertil
I would compare it to Google/Alphabet. They have acquired enough companies and
have a tight relationship with enough autonomous projects to need the
structure of a holding, but the place remains at its core a technology
company.

Google decided to brand the holding differently, which probably makes good
marketing sense.

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hkmurakami
Imo it's closer to what Softbank is doing, since so few of the arms are home
grown.

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umeshunni
But what're the core tech products SoftBank produces?

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hkmurakami
I'd say mobile search and mobile web services, since Yahoo Japan was/is a
legitimate joint venture by Softbank and Yahoo where they started it from the
ground up, and the services being pre installed on Softbank phones made a huge
strategic impact on user adoption.

They are the low cost leader in mobile telephony, have a vast solar operation
(heavy govt subsidies), and have a powerful contract software Salesforce.

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drawkbox
Tencent is pretty good to companies they take in so this is probably great for
Snap.

For instance in gaming, Tencent bought majority stakes in Riot Game, minority
stakes in Epic games who are doing amazing things for the Unreal Engine, Rovio
a top mobile publisher (Angry Birds) and a bit of Activision/Blizzard. So far
all of those companies benefitted from the partnership.

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fergyfresh
100% related to the Facebook having an algorithm to blacklist photos based on
naked photos of ppl. Snapchat has those already for like 35% of its users or
something I'd bet.

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bertil
I can’t imagine identifying naked people or pornography to be computationally
hard (the difference include hippies on holidays or medical images, typically
dermatology, and you want that even less) at least not for a search engine
with image previews.

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fergyfresh
Not that its computationally hard to say is this a naked person (#notahotdog
from silicon valley). It's more along the lines of show me all naked pictures
of ME on the internet, is probably more computationally hard.

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dwighttk
showing me all the naked pictures of ME on the internet is just a null
function

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abpavel
Timing with Trump visit seems to suggest that it's one of those deals that
make it during the negotiations of economic relations - who infuses who with
more cash - yet at the same time make the invetsment as strategic as possible

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teen
I wonder if this has anything to do with snap's real estate.

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Kyragem
Twelvecent

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PatientTrades
I'd bet this 12% stake is actually a behind the scenes loan in the form of
buying stock. No way would any smart investment company have genuine long term
interest in Snapchat at this point. Older people are not using snapchat, and
younger people will grow out of it within the next 5-7 years. Snap is still a
major short imo, will be under $10 a share in next 6-8 months

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finkin1
That's an awful lot of bold claims without any supporting evidence or logical
analysis.

Why do you think the 12% stake is a loan?

Why are you so sure no smart investment company would have a genuine long term
interest in Snap?

Why will younger people grow out of it in the next 5-7 years? And if it's
going to take 5-7 years, why would the stock be under $10 (keeping in mind
it's $12.64 right now) in the next 6-8 months?

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blue_bells
This is a really positive development for Snap -- one of their biggest
challenges is that while Facebook, WeChat, WhatsApp, LINE, and other social
networking apps have been gobbling the newly international user-base, Snap has
really stalled, with user growth of only about 10% in the last year in "Rest
of world" (non-Asia/Europe). [1] Hopefully Tencent can help them get back on
track

[1] [http://www.businessinsider.com/one-chart-shows-snapchats-
use...](http://www.businessinsider.com/one-chart-shows-snapchats-user-
growth-2017-8)

