In March 2010 McKinsey published an article dealing with the obsession of the Internet of the Chinese population by concluding the following statement „People in the country’s 60 largest cities spend 70 percent of their leisure time online. Seismic changes in the consumer market are likely as a result.“1 China’s Internet population increased at the end of 2012 to a total number of 564 million users compared to approximately 250 million users in 2008, according to the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIN).2 The main reasons for this enormous growth is strongly connected with different aspects, as for instance the After this short definition of the SWOT-Analysis the next step will be to work out the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of the Tencent Holdings Limited. 3 SWOT-Analysis of Tencent Holdings Limited 3.2 Internal Environment Analysis
As mentioned in the Introduction the Internet Industry in China is booming. To cover all possible marketplaces in the Internet Tencent offers a broad range of products and services. Besides the most popular service, the instant Messenger called QQ including numerous added services, Tencent provides online media, (wireless) internet value added services, interactive entertainment services, especially in the online-gaming sector, e-commerce platforms and services as well as online advertisement services.18 Tencent also follows latest trends, as for instance launching a mobile application of a messaging service and added games and a mobile payment system, because of the latest development of using smartphones and tablets instead of personal computers.19 Tencent is one of the oldest Internet corporations in China and with its QQ platform the company reached 798,2 million user accounts by the end of 2012.20 As a result, Tencent influenced the communication
