Tencent billionaire launches blistering tirade against staff as empire starts to crack

MANY chief executives of multinational companies like to close out the year with a message of congratulations. Tencent Holdings’ billionaire co-founder Pony Ma, however, delivered a no-holds-barred rant about slacking, oblivious and even corrupt employees.

Ma’s tirade marked a rare show of frustration for the usually mild-mannered mogul, who helped create China’s largest Internet company while staying away from the spotlight. Last week, he convened a town hall meeting to personally deliver a blistering attack against the way staff managed Tencent’s businesses, from social media and content to gaming. People who attended the 10-minute lecture said his message was that they all needed to get their act together, given the uncertain survival of some units in the company.

The attendees, who declined to be named describing an internal event, quoted Ma as saying: “You can’t even survive as a business, yet you’re chilling on the weekends, playing ball.” The remarks were first reported by local media outlet Jiemian.

Tencent’s growth has evaporated over the past year, in the aftermath of a sweeping crackdown on private enterprise in China. Its gaming business came under attack from regulations intended to curb youth addiction, while an economic slowdown twinned with punishing Covid curbs eroded its advertising segment. The company cut jobs by the thousands this year, shrinking its workforce for the first time in almost a decade.

Ma and his lieutenants have mostly maintained an upbeat tone in public, lauding efforts to clean up Internet content and restructure the gaming industry. They also expressed hopes that its reforms were mostly completed, and that Tencent could get back to quality growth.

But in last week’s internal address, Ma laid into virtually every facet of his US$400 billion Internet empire. 

GET BT IN YOUR INBOX DAILY

Start and end each day with the latest news stories and analyses delivered straight to your inbox.

Sign UpVIEW ALL

He upbraided the bread-and-butter gaming division for frittering away money to acquire users for hastily-released titles, rather than focusing on quality. Attendees said he also accused employees of “superficial” reforms to spending and costs. They added that he even said corruption remained rampant across the ranks, without elaborating.

In addition, Tencent’s relatively-nascent cloud arm was accused of a wasteful market-share grab against Alibaba and Huawei, though Ma acknowledged that it had corrected course quickly.

But he reserved his harshest comments for the company’s ageing social network and content empire, which was losing ground to mobile-native rivals such as ByteDance, the Chinese owner of TikTok.

While Tencent’s years-old news service was finally in the black after job cuts, Ma was quoted by attendees as saying the unit could be culled if results do not improve: “Could that business get cut? I told the team – possibly.”

One silver lining appeared to be WeChat’s short-video feed, Ma said. Tencent has been laser-focused on growing the TikTok-style feature, which has yet to fully monetise content with e-commerce and advertising offerings. Executives said advertising revenue generated by the new service should surpass one billion yuan (S$193.3 million) in the fourth quarter.

But China’s biggest social media giant must continue to slash costs aggressively in 2023 – or managers will do it for them, Ma said.

Representatives for Tencent did not immediately respond to a request for comment. BLOOMBERG