China's Internet Giants

choi

China's internet giants l Three Kingdoms, Two Empires; China's internet giants battle at home and abroad. Economist, Apr 22, 2017.
http://www.economist.com/news/bu ... -internet-giants-go

Note:
(a) "as the two firms [Alibaba and Tencent] become global forces, the third member of China's 'BAT' trio of internet giants, Baidu * * * is lagging behind."
(b) "All three firms differ from their Western peers in important ways. First, Western companies usually prefer to focus on a few core areas, whereas Chinese internet firms typically try to do everything from cloud computing to digital payments. * * * Second, with the exception of political censorship, the internet sector in China is lightly regulated. * * * Chinese internet firms can achieve market domination of a sort that would attract close attention in other markets.  The third difference is [China lacks physical infrastructure: third-tier cities often lack big retail centres: ie, a shopping mall. So Chinese must turn to the Web.]
(c) "the trio [are] fighting bloody turf wars among each other. The outcome to this battle is rapidly becoming clear. Tencent and Alibaba are surging ahead * * * The common jibe about Baidu among local experts is that it is becoming the Yahoo of China, a once-dominant search giant that sank owing to a lack of innovation and a series of management blunders.  Its revenue growth fell to 6.3% in 2016, down from 35% in 2015 and 54% in 2014."

(d)"Of the other two giants, Tencent is probably the most fearsome. It already has higher revenues and profits than Alibaba * * * Its main weapon against Alibaba is its stake in JD.com [which competes head-to-head with Alibaba in e-commerce] * * * Mr Ma’s chief weapon for going global, however, is Ant Financial, which was spun out of Alibaba before the latter’s $25bn flotation in 2014 in New York. * * * it [Ant] even runs the mainland's first proper consumer credit-scoring agency, Sesame Credit 芝麻信用, which uses big data to work out the creditworthiness of punters. * * * One reason for these purchases [abroad] is that Tencent's earlier efforts to promote WeChat abroad * * * flopped. Established social networks such as Facebook and WhatsApp proved too entrenched to dislodge. They [Americans] also did some copying of their own: once they adopted some of WeChat’s innovations, Western consumers had little reason to switch to the Chinese network.  Such investments have been in Tencent's core areas, away from turf occupied by Alibaba and Baidu. * * * But in other ways their domestic war is spilling into foreign markets."
(i) A "punter" is one that punts."
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/punter
(ii) But here the punter is British English, whose definition is not found in American English dictionaries.
(A) punter (n):
"1 British informal  a person who gambles, places a bet, or makes a risky investment
1.1 A customer or client, especially a member of an audience  <It is often small things that make all the difference to the loyal punter and inspire repeat business, or not.>"
https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/punter
(B) punt (n, vi): "British informal  bet"
https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/punt

(e) Baidu "has a respected AI laboratory in Silicon Valley, despite the recent departure of Andrew Ng 吳恩達 ['born in the UK in 1976. His parents were both Hongkongers': en.wikipedia.org], an AI expert. But Baidu does not have the same firepower as Alibaba and Tencent. It tried but has failed to conquer foreign markets such as Japan with its search engine."
(f) "It would be an error to neglect the profitable domestic market. Goldman Sachs, an investment bank, reckons that China's online retail market will more than double in size by 2020, to $1.7trn."