Pony Ma had a prosperous year

Author | Huang Yu

Editor | Zhou Zhiyu

China's largest internet company by market value—Tencent's annual meeting is here again. Unlike the criticism and reflection of the past two years, this year, Ma Huateng's satisfaction has clearly increased, and he hopes that 2025 will be a year full of harvests.

According to Wall Street News, on January 13, at Tencent Group's 2024 annual meeting, Chairman of the Board and CEO Ma Huateng reviewed in detail the development of various businesses under Tencent over the past year, including the recently much-discussed "Gift" feature of WeChat Mini Stores.

The "Gift" feature of WeChat Mini Stores, which began gray testing last month, can be considered Tencent's first market-discussed initiative after more than two years of re-energizing its e-commerce efforts, with many comparing this feature to WeChat red envelopes.

In response, Ma Huateng expressed hope that the outside world would not overly hype the "Gift" feature, stating that WeChat aims to take five years or even longer to build an e-commerce ecological connector, leveraging the power of social interaction, emphasizing that slow work produces fine products, and aiming to create high-quality offerings, with expectations for more "blue envelopes" and new ideas in the future.

This statement aligns with WeChat's traditionally cautious approach to commercialization and is consistent with Tencent's previous external communications.

Wall Street News learned that at the recent 2025 WeChat Public Class, a lecturer in the WeChat Mini Store session stated: "After the launch of the 'Gift' feature, the outside world has been overly enthusiastic, with some data and conclusions even exceeding our own understanding."

At this annual meeting, Ma Huateng also elaborated on WeChat's current approach to e-commerce.

Ma Huateng reviewed the exploration and thinking of the past year regarding the WeChat trading ecosystem, especially how to break the inertia of "live-streaming e-commerce" to seek breakthroughs. "Xiao Long believes that products are information and should not be limited to video accounts but should be integrated into the entire WeChat ecosystem, thinking about e-commerce from an atomic level. The path taken this way is different from others and will go further.

Over the past year, WeChat e-commerce has indeed undergone significant changes.

In August 2024, the Video Account Mini Store was upgraded to WeChat Mini Store. This means that Tencent's e-commerce has officially moved out of short videos and live streaming, and WeChat Mini Stores will support the circulation of store and product information across multiple WeChat scenarios, including official accounts (subscription accounts, service accounts), video accounts (live streaming, short videos), mini programs, search, chat sessions, communities, and Moments.

Soon, the e-commerce business was handed over to WeChat, and the Tencent advertising team no longer engaged in live-streaming sales operations and governance. In May last year, the Video Account e-commerce team was also merged into the WeChat Open Platform, integrating teams related to transactions such as mini programs and official accounts, ending the internally chaotic situation of cross-departmental management.

From the upgrade of Video Account Mini Store to WeChat Mini Store, Tencent's e-commerce business has clearly embarked on a path with greater imaginative potential.

Analysts at Guangfa Securities believe that WeChat does not base its approach on the successful paths of other platforms but has continuously sought a business model suitable for its own social field. WeChat Mini Stores leverage social attributes to drive supply and demand, with the WeChat environment providing conversion and repurchase opportunities, likely forming a uniquely lightweight social e-commerce model The lecturer of the WeChat public class revealed that data shows that in the past year, the scale of WeChat mini-stores has grown rapidly and reached a new high, with GMV being 1.92 times that of 2023, the number of orders being 2.25 times, and the number of monthly sold products being 1.7 times, with growth rates basically on par with 2023. According to market news, the GMV of video account e-commerce is around 100 billion yuan in 2023.

Although the scale of WeChat mini-stores still has a significant difference compared to other mainstream e-commerce platforms that often reach trillions, according to Tencent's financial report, the GMV of mini-programs reached 2 trillion yuan in the third quarter of last year, which includes e-commerce transaction scale. It is believed that as WeChat mini-stores convert more mini-program merchants and leverage social gameplay, they can quickly gain more incremental growth.

Specifically regarding the video account, which was referred to by Ma Huateng as "the hope of the entire Goose Factory," Ma Huateng stated at the annual meeting that the characteristics of the video account include familiar social interactions, with the current audience primarily being middle-aged and elderly people, and it still needs to penetrate deeper and appeal to younger audiences.

In addition to the highly regarded WXG (WeChat Business Group), Ma Huateng also praised CSIG (Cloud and Smart Industry Group) significantly.

Ma Huateng stated that this year, CSIG's performance exceeded his original expectations. In addition to To C businesses (such as Tencent Meeting and travel maps) and AI, To B businesses are already very close to "surfacing." Once they "surface," there will be a lot of room for imagination. By 2025, CSIG will have many opportunities and is expected to "surface and form a continent."

This round of transformation for CSIG began in 2022. That year, under internal and external challenges, Tencent Group, feeling the crisis, launched a reform focused on cost reduction and efficiency improvement, while CSIG halted its all-encompassing development model and shifted to a strategy of self-researched products and integration.

At last year's annual meeting, Ma Huateng again requested that, apart from particularly important strategic products and foundational investments, many CSIG products must quickly come to fruition. Against this backdrop, Tencent Cloud internally also proposed to achieve a breakeven target last year.

In September last year, Tencent Group's Senior Executive Vice President and CEO of Cloud and Smart Industry Group, Tang Daosheng, also revealed to Wall Street News that he was generally satisfied with the results of the transformation over the past two years, and that in 2024, CSIG would significantly reduce losses compared to the previous year, with the profitability target not being too far away.

As a pillar business of Tencent, gaming was also a key focus of Ma Huateng's comments at the annual meeting, and it has begun to regain its confidence after the gloom of the previous two years.

Last year, Ma Huateng stated that gaming is Tencent's ace business, currently claiming to be the largest gaming company in the world, seemingly resting on the laurels of success. "However, in the past year, we faced significant challenges, with a new generation of gaming companies emerging one after another, transitioning from gameplay to content, leaving us somewhat at a loss, while competitors continuously produced new products, making us feel as if we had made no achievements."

This year, Ma Huateng also began to praise the gaming business, stating that IEG (Interactive Entertainment Group) has performed "very well" overall this year, with progress in both domestic and international businesses in terms of sustainability and navigating cycles. "The entire organizational structure and morale have undergone significant changes." He also revealed that Tencent's overseas gaming business share has approached half of its domestic gaming business, and he expects even faster development in the future.

Tencent's financial report shows that in the third quarter of last year, Tencent Games' total revenue was 51.8 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 12.6%, the highest growth rate in nearly three years, with domestic game revenue of 37.3 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 14%; international game revenue was 14.5 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 9%.

Since 2023, the amount of "AI" has become an important indicator for the capital market to assess a technology company, which not only relates to whether it can reshape its business with AI but also affects its future market prospects.

At this annual meeting, Pony Ma also expressed expectations for the TEG (Technology Engineering Group) responsible for Tencent's Hunyuan large model development. He mentioned the hope to implement end-to-end voice interaction for Tencent Hunyuan. TEG has made structural adjustments and will focus more on building the technical foundation, while productization is hoped to be promoted by other business groups.

Pony Ma also stated that Tencent will continue to invest resources in computing power reserves, hoping that each BG can embrace the productization of large models. Currently, products including WeChat, QQ, input methods, and browsers will launch AI intelligent agents, while games, WeChat Reading, Tencent Video, and other products will also explore more AI based on Hunyuan.

At the end of his speech, after proposing the "Debug spirit" during Tencent's anniversary celebration in November, Pony Ma again mentioned that the requirements for the management team have been raised, stating, "By 2025, I hope everyone can see more space and cultivate more capabilities. I believe this will be a fruitful year."

After two years of transformation, Tencent has achieved a rebound from the bottom and will continue to seek incremental growth, promoting the old trees to thrive and allowing the "new shoots" to grow strong