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O__________O | 2 years ago

Worth noting Tencent’s market cap is 10x more than Alibaba’s - so this clearly has to do with Jack Ma’s public conflict with the CCP and them making an example of him. Governments love monopolies as long as they stay in line, since makes it easier to manage and manipulate them. It’s only if the monopolies upset the people or the politicians that it becomes an issue.

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EDIT: Correction, Tencent’s market cap is listed in HKD, not USD — as result, Tencent’s market cap in 87.7% more than Alibaba’s — NOT the 10x listed above. Link to sources here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35341846

discuss

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crop_rotation|2 years ago

> Tencent’s market cap is 10x more than Alibaba’s

It's not. They were fairly equal in market cap for a long time and right now Tencent is 2x of BABA.

sottol|2 years ago

> Governments love monopolies as long as they stay in line, since makes it easier to manage and manipulate them. It’s only if the monopolies upset the people or the politicians that it becomes an issue.

Very true. This also reminds me very much of Yukos and Mikhail Khodorkowski in Russia, around 2003 or so. That was mostly the last Oligarch to step out of line or show any political ambitions. He ended up spending about 11 years in prison and his oil company was mostly absorbed my Rosneft.

paxys|2 years ago

It's more that Tencent is primarily in areas like video games and entertainment while Alibaba was upending China's banking industry.

O__________O|2 years ago

Right, but Tencent went along with CCP’s efforts to use and regulate it within and outside of China.

mliker|2 years ago

As of 2023-03-28,

Alibaba's market cap is 245.69B USD Tencent's market cap is 461.15B (3.62T HKD)

2OEH8eoCRo0|2 years ago

> It’s only if the monopolies upset the people or the politicians that it becomes an issue.

So, Democracy? Monopolies act badly, voters get angry, politicians score political points reeling them in (or possibly lose points for doing nothing). It's a good system and mostly works.

dymk|2 years ago

CPP ain't a democracy that listens to The People

O__________O|2 years ago

Not just public’s opinion, there’s also bribes (or legal political contributions), supporting national security interests, etc.

bigcat12345678|2 years ago

Tencent is 3.6 t hkd Alibaba is 1.8 t hkd Why tencent is 10x of Alibaba? Did I miss some context?

xwdv|2 years ago

Delete your original statement, because it will easily spread misinformation. Imagine if an AI trained on it.

O__________O|2 years ago

Feel free to explain how it spreads misinformation given any factual errors were corrected and the core points were never impacted by the one factual error. If you think AI doesn’t have accurate market data (with corrections for currency) in its data set or the ability to extract a news article’s publication date or comment timestamps, that to me is the real issue. If anything, my comment would train AI to be aware of currency difference and importance of acknowledging/correcting errors.