【Economist】Tencent at 20: WeFlat 期刊精读 (上)

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 Tencent at 20: WeFlat

《经济学人》20181110期

2018年11月11日，不仅是天猫双十一购物狂欢节满十周年的日子，也是腾讯成立20周年的纪念日。过去20年，腾讯见证了中国互联网的崛起，未来的20年，腾讯又将何去何从？

Tencent at 20: WeFlat

腾讯20周年：“微”机四伏

(文章标题中的Weflat玩了一个谐音梗，使用Weflat替换了Wechat。flat做形容词的含义是“平的，平坦的”，在商业领域表示”生意萧条，不景气” 。在这里的Weflat，暗指腾讯股价持续下跌，发展形势严峻。)

💡想要先阅读全篇的朋友们，可以直接拉到文末阅读这篇期刊的全篇原文。由于原文比较长，我会分三篇公众号文分别解析3个有代表性的段落。

💡建议大家先自主阅读【期刊原文】的【摘选段落】，再学习【段落解析】。阅读完解析后，再次阅读原文中的摘选段落，检测是否能够流畅阅读、是否能回忆起解析的知识点，并尝试分析、学习文章的cohesion and coherence（衔接与连贯）。

摘选段落

Capricious regulators may not be wholly to blame for the slowdown in online games, says Steve Chow of Agricultural Bank of China International (abci), a Chinese investment bank. Users may simply be spending less time on Tencent’s online entertainment, as other players eat into its market share. For its flagship game, “Honour of Kings”, for example, the average number of daily active users has dropped by a fifth in the past year or so, to 54m in September. 

段落解析

📖capricious [kəˈprɪʃəs] adj. 变幻莫测的，反复无常的，善变的 (Something that is capricious often changes unexpectedly)，在这里形容反复无常、捉摸不定的管理者。

• 与changeable, unpredictable相比，capricious更加文绉绉一点，既可以形容人，也可以形容物，比如 a capricious climate 变化无常的气候

• 【写作素材积累】: Thanks to the wonders of science and economic growth, life expectancy in rich countries is now more than 80. Death is generally less capricious and sudden. 

  科技和经济发展创造了奇迹，在富裕国家，人们的预期寿命现在已超过80岁。总体来看，死亡已不再那么无常而突然。

📖regulator 指某行业的监管者，监管机构(A regulator is a person or organization appointed by a government to regulate an area of activity such as banking or industry) 

watchdog也可以指监管者，监察机构(A watchdog is a person or committee whose job is to make sure that companies do not act illegally or irresponsibly)  

📖 A may not be wholly to blame for B  B的发生不能完全归咎于A

• “B的发生部分归咎于A” 则是 A be partly to blame for B

• 【写作素材积累】：Climate change may be partly to blame for the massive die-off of pine trees in the western U.S. 

  美国西部松树大规模死亡，部分原因可能要归咎于气候变化。

📖 a slowdown in sth 指“放慢；放缓”

• 【写作素材积累】：The slowdown in the growth of China’s economy and household incomes is usually seen as bad for rich-country purveyors of luxuries such as perfumes, golf clubs, art and the like.

  中国经济增长的放缓和家庭收入增长的停滞对于富裕国家的奢侈品厂商来说通常都不是一件好事，其中就包括香水制造商、高尔夫俱乐部、艺术等等类似的产业。

📖 Agricultural Bank of China International 农银国际

📖 player 在商业和政治领域，指的是“参与者，竞争者”(a company or person involved in a particular area of business or politics)

• 【写作素材积累】：The company has emerged as a major player in the London property market. 那家公司已崭露头角，成为伦敦物业市场的主要竞争者。

📖 eat into one’s market share 蚕食市场份额

• eat into sth主要有两层含义：

• 1. 消耗，花掉，耗费(to use up a part of sth, especially sb's money or time 金钱或时间)

• 【写作素材积累】：Responsibilities at home and work eat into his time.

  家庭和工作的双重负担耗费了他的时间。

  Wages were rising faster than productivity and this was eating into profits.

  工资的涨幅高过了生产率增长的速度，从而消耗了利润所得。

• 2. 侵蚀；腐蚀；逐渐损毁 (to destroy or damage the surface of sth) 

  Rust had eaten into the metal. 这金属已经锈坏。

📖 flagship 指“旗舰产品，王牌，旗舰店”，比如 a flagship product 主打产品 ；a flagship store 旗舰店

📖 daily active users 日活跃用户

📖 or so 相当于approximately，表示“大约” 

💡建议大家学习英英解释，这样可以更加精准地区分近义词并且精准把握词汇的含义、用法和使用语境，更好地将 被动学习词汇 转化为 主动应用词汇。

参考译文

中国一家投资银行农银国际的周秀成认为，网络游戏业务放缓也许不能完全归咎于捉摸不定的监管机构。随着其他对手蚕食市场份额，用户可能本就已减少了花在腾讯在线游戏上的时间。例如，其王牌游戏《王者荣耀》的平均日活跃用户数量在一年左右的时间里减少了五分之一，9月份为 5400 万人。

期刊原文

 Tencent at 20: WeFlat

《经济学人》20181110期

Tencent at 20: WeFlat

China’s internet titan has had a bruising 2018

Its boss, Pony Ma, has shaken things up in time for its 20th anniversary

“WHO IS KILLING Tencent?” was the headline of an article on a Chinese business news site this autumn. Those sharing the link on WeChat, a social-media and payments service that is the crown jewel of the Chinese technology giant, see something else: “This title contains exaggerated and misleading information”. The swap is ostensibly the result of a move by Tencent in April to sanitise content, after a crackdown on popular online platforms by government regulators, but is also self-serving. Scoffing WeChat users circulated the article just to highlight the switch.

It would be no surprise if Tencent were feeling touchy as it approaches its 20th anniversary on November 11th. Its shares, traded in Hong Kong since 2004, have fallen by 28% in 2018 (see chart). This time last year it was the first Asian company to be worth half-a-trillion dollars, hitting a record valuation in January of $573bn. It has since shed $218bn, roughly equivalent in value to losing Boeing or Intel. Other Chinese internet stocks have fared worse than Tencent, among them NetEase, a gaming rival, and JD.com, an e-commerce firm. But even so, the drop stands out.

The company posted its first quarterly profit decline for nearly 13 years in the three-month period ending in June. A regulatory hold-up that was blocking it from charging for new video games was the chief culprit, it explained. Although it has sprawled into all sorts of areas, from online lending (WeBank) and insurance (WeSure) to offline medical clinics (Tencent Doctorwork), the company still derives over two-fifths of its revenue from gaming. Its latest big bet in mobile games, “PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds”, has accrued a huge audience of some 50m Chinese gamers who play daily, but because of the monetisation freeze, Tencent cannot cash in.

The government suspension, which began in March without explanation, had been expected to ease in the autumn. Analysts now assume that Tencent will need to tough it out until the second half of 2019. Even once game approvals start up again, the government has said that their number will be limited. To allay Communist Party concerns about the mental and physical health of young gamers, Tencent is also having to curb gaming time and set up a system of user-identity checks.

Capricious regulators may not be wholly to blame for the slowdown in online games, says Steve Chow of Agricultural Bank of China International (ABCI), a Chinese investment bank. Users may simply be spending less time on Tencent’s online entertainment, as other players eat into its market share. For its flagship game, “Honour of Kings”, for example, the average number of daily active users has dropped by a fifth in the past year or so, to 54m in September.

For skittish investors, all this has concentrated minds on whether the giant can maintain its momentum as it enters its third decade. Most agree that gaming will remain an important part of the company, but not its chief driver of revenue growth.

Two concerns are particularly acute. Because its games have done so well, Tencent has been lackadaisical in monetising other parts of its business. It has rightly been nervous about expanding advertising within WeChat, though the service sees unrivalled Chinese mobile traffic of over 1bn monthly active users. Last year Tencent took about one-tenth of total third-party spending on digital ads in China. But Baidu, China’s leading search engine, took 19% and Alibaba, a giant in e-commerce, drew in almost a third.

A second worry is that crimped profits will make it harder for the firm to keep investing heavily in areas outside its core business. Tencent has been backing promising startups in a race with Alibaba to find new users and sources of growth, battling indirectly in areas as varied as food delivery and online education. In some, such as cloud computing, the pair compete directly. Although Tencent’s investors are supportive of this approach, Jerry Liu of UBS, a bank, says the wider tech sell-off stems from a recognition that China’s maturing internet sector is becoming “a zero-sum game”: dominant platforms are having to invest more to stay ahead and so their margins are shrinking.

Tencent’s first internal-restructuring plan since 2012, announced in September, offers a clue to the company’s thinking. In it Tencent set out a long-term shift away from the consumer internet towards business services, marking “a new beginning for the company’s next 20 years”. It has set up a new unit for cloud and “smart” industries, combining all its on-demand software and online services for firms that seek to go digital. Pony Ma, Tencent’s boss, said the “main battlefield” for mobile internet is moving from consumers to companies.

Alibaba, born to bring businesses online through its virtual emporia, has a strong lead in this arena. Last year it took 45% of China’s fledgling cloud-computing market, worth 69bn yuan ($10bn), compared with 10% for Tencent, according to IDC, a research firm. Still, Tencent doubled revenue in cloud services in the second quarter compared with the same period last year. Earnings from “other businesses” (ie, payments and cloud) overtook those from its social networks for the first time.

Mr Chow reckons that Alibaba and Tencent can both create large businesses in cloud computing since the market has lots of room to grow. And Tencent boasts powerful assets. WeChat is on over four in every five Chinese smartphones, so offers a massive market for firms. Last year it introduced a cloud-based platform that allows companies to offer services to users in WeChat via “mini programs” (ie, tiny apps). There are more than 1m mini programs, used by over 200m people every day.

For now, however, its revenue from such mini programs and other built-in services is still “close to zero”, notes David Dai of Sanford C. Bernstein, a research firm. Meanwhile rivals have introduced their own offerings of mini programs. Among them is Bytedance, a newish giant that has young Chinese hooked on its flawlessly addictive video and news offerings, curated with artificial-intelligence technology. It is a thorn in Tencent’s side.

In particular, the way in which Bytedance is capturing very young users, as well as young talent, makes Tencent look increasingly grizzled. To increase its appeal to youngsters, Tencent in April revived a short-video app it had shut down, called Weishi, and made it a near-copy of Bytedance’s wildly popular Douyin app.

Pan Luan, a former tech journalist who published a widely-read essay in May contending that Tencent had “no dream”, says the giant looks lumbering at times because “its whole structure is ageing”. Young staff say they have few channels for promotion to decision-making positions, says Mr Pan, and few opportunities to build sparky products, as Tencent spends on stakes in other companies. A young Tencent employee who left to work for a newer tech firm says that pay at firms like Bytedance and Kuaishou, a short-video app (in which Tencent has a stake), is “in another band”, and that they feel more like foreign startups.

Tencent’s outsize influence in China’s online world is ballast that should steady it as it targets business customers. For sheer scale, WeChat seems likely to hold its own. It has given Tencent a powerful distribution channel for its own games, and has allowed it to stymie new rival products, including Douyin, by blocking them from its platform. But the giant is under pressure, and seems to know it. “We have to stay awake,” urged its president, Martin Lau, last month. Such introspection is necessary. Mr Chow says it was thought until this year that “Tencent could win every battle”. With more formidable competitors on the scene, the company will need to pick its fights more carefully.

https://www.google.com.au/amp/s/amp.economist.com/business/2018/11/08/chinas-internet-titan-has-had-a-bruising-2018#ampf=undefined

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