腾讯拟分拆音乐,出版和搜索业务
China’s Tencent is spinning off parts of its empire in a move that will help incentivise the units’ management — but is unlikely to crystallise much value for the $380bn social media giant. Tencent, best known for its massively popular WeChat app and mobile payments service, also owns a range of businesses designed to keep users in its ecosystem from the moment they wake up: paying for meals, chatting, booking taxis and gaming. So far, it has largely kept its empire under one roof. But in the past month, it has filed plans to spin off online publisher China Literature on the Hong Kong bourse and Sogou, China’s second biggest search engine which it co-owns with Sohu, in the US. Bankers expect it to follow up with the listing of China Music, the world’s third biggest music subscription business. Tencent put the streaming operation together by acquiring two big competitors last year and bolting them on to its home grown QQ Music, giving it a nearly two-thirds market share, according to iiMedia. It also acquired exclusive rights from all the major international record labels, including Universal Music Group, giving it an effective monopoly on streaming of western mainstream music in its home market. Tencent claims 15m subscribers, meaning it trails only Spotify and AppleMusic in paying customers, and has 600m monthly active users. That leaves its monetisation record of turning free users into paying subscribers, at 2.5 per cent, lagging well behind Spotify, which has 60m paying customers and over 140m users. While that partly highlights the battle to make music pay, others see the low number as massive potential for growth. “They’ve only started to scratch the surface,” said one Hong Kong-based banker. |