Chinese tech giant Tencent has recorded its first ever quarter-to-quarter revenue fall, warned that COVID-19 lockdowns will hurt messing with its business, and cautioned against assumptions that Beijing is ready to enthusiastically support tech companies.
On its Q1 2022 earnings call yesterday, the company offered more explanation of its shifting cloud strategy.
Chief strategy officer James Mitchell told investors the company is pleased to have shown loss-making cloud customers the door, and “proactively scaled back … deeply discounted infrastructure-only contracts for basic services such as cloud compute and content delivery network.” Projects that had high costs and/or relied on sub-contractors have also been scaled back.
Tencent is instead chasing platform-as-a-service deals across in video, cloud and cybersecurity.
Mitchell was asked about Tencent Cloud’s revenue mix and opined that the local cloud market is different to that in the West because around half of Chinese clouds’ revenue comes from other internet companies. Of the remainder, most comes from businesses born offline such as financial services, manufacturing, and government. Western…
