Pony Ma tells employees Tencent is ordinary and replaceable in company meeting

Tencent CEO Pony Ma Huateng referred to his Chinese multinational company as "ordinary" and replaceable in a leaked company speech given at the 2021 end of year employee meeting. A woman looks at the sky while walking through the streets of Shenzhen against the backdrop of the Tencent Building A woman looks at the sky in …

[MiguelC]

The last thing tech billionaires in China want is to be seen - by the government - as making any kind of waves. They got the message loud and clear, if you kowtow the party line, the future will be bright; if you don't, well, ask Jack Ma where he spent those months far away from public view...

[Anonymous Coward]

"...have your humility leaked to the press."

...maybe leaked intentionally?

Guerilla marketing is world wide.

[Anonymous Coward]

No one and nothing is irreplaceable in China....

.... but Xi Jinping, of course...

[Brewster's Angle Grinder]

I wouldn't want to live in China, but they could teach us a few things about dealing with monopolies and over powerful corporations.

[Anonymous Coward]

Except where that that monopoly and over-powerful entity is the "people's" government…

Free elections, multi-party democracy, fair voting systems, nah, you don't want any of that…

[Snake]

Is it any worse than the corporatism that so much of the capitalist world has fallen into?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, that you can't change it without tanks running over you... Tienanmen docet.

[llaryllama]

This kind of smug self-deprecating whataboutism will be the fall of western style democracy and you'll soon learn that authoritarian pseudo-communism is really no fun.

I've lived in enough places to know that flawed democracy is always better than pretty much any other style of government. Even good people become corrupted after holding power for too long. The liberal democratic model is full of cronies, corruption, bribes and all that good stuff but at its core is a stable foundation that allows the bad apples to be picked off.

[Cliffwilliams44]

There's a word for that, except many today do not understand its real meaning due to 70 years of mis-information. It's called Fascism!

[Lucy in the Sky (with Diamonds)]

Seen this somewhere before...

"I am making this speech out of my free will. I am treated well, and not been harmed in any way. I have been assured, that I will be released once the demands are met. Glory to the glorious nation of <insert name of captors' nation here>!"

[sanmigueelbeer]

Re: Seen this somewhere before...

USS Pueblo, the crew were beaten black-n-blue before they were paraded to the worldwide TV interview. They were further beaten up when one of the crew flashed a "bird", captured on TV, and told the NK that it was a sign of "good luck".

[DS999]

Sounds like a hostage video

He's clearly been beaten into submission.

Can you imagine the CEO of Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon or Intel standing up on a stage and telling employees "We aren't doing anything anyone else can't do. All our products and people are replaceable and nothing special. Now go out there and be ordinary, and don't rock the boat!"

I think the days of worrying that Chinese companies will move into the western world and push out western ones are over. Western companies may be selling Chinese made products (at least until that gets expensive enough they offshore to somewhere cheaper) but Chinese companies will not be making the big leaps into new product categories.

You can't change the course of an industry or create one like the iPhone or Facebook or eBay or etc. etc. with conformist thinking and fear of risk taking.

[Snowy]

Tencent

Been buying quite a lot of stuff outside China, almost as if they want to leave China altogether?

[DS999]

Re: Tencent

They have strict capital controls to prevent their billionaires from moving all their money outside of China, but if your company simply expands outside China you could one day abandon the in-China part of the company down the road if/when things get too dicey.

[W.S.Gosset]

He's alive?!?

Or was it more:

Hi everybody, I'm P-P-P-Po-Po-Pony M-M-Ma-X Headroom

[W.S.Gosset]

Re: He's alive?!?

MaXi Headroom, in this case