02/03/2020
- The enterprise collaboration industry in China is forecast to achieve a compound annual growth rate of 12.4 per cent over five years to reach US$7 billion by 2024
Tencent has been accused of using its market dominance with WeChat to stifle competition. Photo: Reuters
Tencent’s super app WeChat, with a user base of 1.2 billion people, has blocked links from a ByteDance remote work tool as Chinese tech giants fight for dominance in the burgeoning enterprise collaboration market.
The latest move adds another ByteDance app to WeChat’s blacklist, which already includes Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, and its sister platform Xigua Video, amid ongoing accusations that Tencent uses its market dominance to stifle competition.
Feishu, the Chinese version of ByteDance’s productivity tool Lark, said Saturday that users could not open any of its links on WeChat, nor could they share name cards to invite colleagues.
Feishu said WeChat did not provide advance notice of the ban, adding that the move has “significantly affected work efficiency and user experience” at a time when many companies in China have moved their office operations online to limit the spread of coronavirus infections.
Instead, Lark users need to copy the link and open it in a browser instead of opening it directly via WeChat.
Tencent launches new social apps as flagships WeChat and QQ show their age
A WeChat representative declined to comment other than to cite the company’s regulations on external links. The rules, introduced in October 2019, said the platform will punish websites or apps that send links to “mislead or entice users to download or redirect to an external app”. Punishment includes blocking their domain name from opening in WeChat.
Xie Xin, a ByteDance vice president overseeing Feishu, said the app does not support sign-ups using a WeChat account nor does it enable the sharing of documents or messages on the Tencent app.
In addition to blocking the ByteDance app, WeChat also suspended two tech-focused media websites, 36Kr and ITHome, from publishing posts on the platform after they reported the Lark case over the weekend. The relevant articles have also been removed from WeChat.
The WeChat representative said it did not force media to delete their articles. Rather, the media in question have violated WeChat’s rules on multiple occasions.
The enterprise collaboration industry in China, which has received a huge boost from the health crisis, is forecast to achieve a compound annual growth rate of 12.4 per cent over five years to reach nearly 49 billion yuan (US$7 billion) by 2024, according to the Qianzhan Industry Research Institute.
Feishu is a small but fast-emerging player in the sector, jumping 40 places from late January to become the 15th most downloaded business iOS app on Monday. However, it still lags far behind Alibaba’s DingTalk and Tencent’s WeChat Work and Tencent Meeting, which ranked as the top three among business iOS apps in China as of Monday, according to App Annie.
Alibaba is the parent company of the South China Morning Post.Tencent has also blocked apps from other Chinese tech giants. Links from Taobao, Alibaba’s online marketplace, and Haokan, a short video app from Baidu, cannot be accessed on WeChat. In contrast, Tencent allows the sharing of links from JD.com and PDD pages, online marketplaces in which it owns a financial stake.
“Having more than 1 billion users, [WeChat] has a monopolistic position in the market,” said Wang Sixin, a professor at the Communication University of China who specialises in media policy and rules. “Under these circumstances, Tencent has to have legitimate reasons to block other apps, otherwise it’s taking advantage of its dominance to force out smaller rivals.”
In April 2019, a Chinese lawyer sued Tencent under the country’s anti-monopoly law, charging that the company’s actions infringed on his rights as a user. In December, the intellectual property court in Beijing heard the case, with Tencent representatives arguing that WeChat did not prevent users from sharing links and using the app on other platforms, Southern Metropolis Daily reported. The court has not yet reached a verdict.
Besides enterprise collaboration, Tencent and ByteDance are coming up against each other in other markets. Last week Tencent began testing a
short video function for WeChat, a sector dominated by TikTok and Douyin, while ByteDance plans to
this year to challenge Tencent’s dominance in gaming
Source: SCMP
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28/08/2019
- It follows Beijing’s decision earlier this month to turn down an application for two US Navy ships to visit Hong Kong
- The countries have traded barbs about the handling of anti-government protests in the city
The US has had port visits denied by Chinese authorities twice this month. Photo: Alamy
A US Navy warship was denied a port visit to the eastern Chinese city of Qingdao on Sunday, the US Indo-Pacific Command said on Wednesday.
The request denial comes at a time of heightened tensions between China and the United States, with the countries engaged in a prolonged trade dispute and a war of words over anti-government protests in Hong Kong.
“The PRC [People’s Republic of China] denied the US Navy’s request to visit the Qingdao Port,” Commander Reann Mommsen, public affairs officer for the US Seventh Fleet, said in a statement on Wednesday.
Mommsen declined to name the warship denied entry or when the request was refused, referring questions about the reasons to Beijing.
The blocked visit was first reported by Reuters, which cited an anonymous US defence official as saying that China had denied the request for the destroyer before the intended visit on Sunday.
It is the second time in a month that China has prevented US Navy vessels making a port call.
On August 13, the United States Pacific Fleet said China had denied requests for two US Navy ships to
visit Hong Kong.
The USS Green Bay, an amphibious dock landing ship, had been due to make a port call in Hong Kong on August 17, and the guided missile cruiser USS Lake Erie was scheduled to visit next month, according to Nate Christensen, deputy spokesman for the Pacific Fleet.
A source close to the Chinese navy confirmed the Qingdao rejection, saying it was “normal practice” based on the current China-US relationship.
“Hasn’t the [US’] application to visit Hong Kong just been rejected?” the source asked.
Hong Kong has seen 12 weeks of anti-government protests, triggered by a now-shelved
that would have allowed criminal suspects to be transferred to mainland China.
Zhou Chenming, a Beijing-based military expert, said the refusal was a natural result of the worsening bilateral ties between China and the US.
“Many bilateral exchanges are bound to deteriorate when countries’ ties worsen, such as during the China-US trade war. And now coupled with the Hong Kong unrest, many exchanges [between China and the US] have been downgraded,” Zhou said.
Liu Weidong, from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, echoed Zhou’s view and said a visit from the US warship would be meaningless at present.
“Now the US is very provocative … so China doesn’t want to welcome its warship,” Liu said.
Doubt has been cast on whether trade talks between the two countries are set to resume, with Beijing’s foreign ministry contradicting US President Donald Trump’s claim that China had sought a return to the negotiating table.
The countries had been due to speak on Tuesday, according to a previous statement from China’s Ministry of Commerce after their last telephone call on August 13. But there has been no announcement so far from either side on whether such a conversation took place.
Last week, China said it would levy retaliatory tariffs of 5 to 10 per cent on US$75 billion worth of US goods. The Trump administration responded by announcing a tariff increase from 25 to 30 per cent on US$250 billion of Chinese goods, and from 10 to 15 per cent on US$300 billion worth of Chinese products.
The US also designated Beijing as a currency manipulator, raising fears of an economic cold war between the two countries.
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