The Tencent Analyst Day and subsequent Ecosystem Summit in September 2024, was used by the company to announce that it is earnestly looking beyond China to expand and deploy its cloud and software solutions.

Regions highlighted as key expansion areas are South-East Asia ex-China, and the Middle East and Africa.

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Tencent stated that its cloud business grew by 400% in revenues over a three-year period with more than 10,000 overseas customers in 30 industries across more than 80 markets. Year-on-year, the Asia-Pacific region business for Tencent cloud grew more than 50%, and business from the MEA region grew 85%.

Into Africa

For Africa, Tencent is advertising itself as a digital inclusion facilitator, incubating African entrepreneurship.

Its recent launch of Orange MEA’s ‘Max it,’ a super app that mimics the Tencent Weixin super app that has more than one billion users, is a sign that the company is looking to replicate and grow its business abroad in partnership with willing telcos.

For Orange MEA, the partnership with Tencent Cloud is a step toward offering relevant services to both Orange and non-Orange subscriber businesses and end users, with ‘Max it’ hosting mini apps – such as subscription management, e-wallet, and e-commerce – that will simplify business, customer, and lifestyle functions by consolidating them on one app platform.

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The service is currently rolled out to six markets and will be deployed to other countries, including Jordan, where Orange operates.

Tencent Saudi cloud

Tencent is also setting up a cloud region in Saudi Arabia in 2025 to add to the 21 it already has, ensuring closer presence to the edge for businesses and companies in the Middle East. It already conducts business with some players there: The UAE ‘Tamm’ e-government platform consolidates more than 700 services, built on the Tencent Cloud’s mini-program platform.

Abu Dhabi’s department of culture and tourism digital ambassador is powered by WeChat, hosted on Tencent Cloud; and Mobily, which selected Tencent Cloud to launch ‘Go Saudi’ to revolutionise the Saudi digital landscape to strategically diversify its enterprise business solutions to AI, cloud, and big data.

Electric vehicles

Beyond telcos, Tencent is heavily penetrated in the electric vehicle industry in mainland China and is inviting foreign electric vehicle manufacturers to allow Tencent Cloud to be hosted so they too can conduct business in China.

The company’s ambitions cover a wide range of industries, including healthcare, gaming, banking, manufacturing, and mining. Thus far, Tencent has assisted AstraZeneca, Mercedes-Benz, Toyota, and Walmart to expand into China.

Tencent on the dollar?

As it is a software company, it is unclear how, when, or if the US ire that has targeted Huawei hardware in recent times will fall on Tencent technologies.

Tencent has been strategic in its expansion thus far by quietly embedding itself in the tech ecosystems of governments and companies before unfavourable legislation can hinder its international growth prospects.

The company has already expanded to the US and Europe, establishing cloud regions in the US in Silicon Valley, California and Virginia; and Frankfurt in Germany.