Tencent Holdings Limited Essay

This has been the major challenge to most of the companies initiating business operations across the country. However, this has had very little impact on the operations of Tencent.
Unlike in the past, however, China's political leaders now pay maximum attention to the environmental challenges facing the country (Chow, 2007). This affects all the business organizations since they are expected to show concern to the environment. Network interruptions as a result of high volumes of smog sometimes affect wireless internet connectivity. This leads to business challenges for Tencent. On the overall, however, there is very little impact on the business transactions of Tencent as a result of environmental factors.
Micro-Environmental Factors
Business micro-environment factors are the forces that arise from within an organization and have a direct influence on the ability of the organization to meet its business needs. According to Kokemuller (2011) the most common business micro environment factors are customers, employees, suppliers, competitors and investors.
Customers
Tencent's customers are the users of online services in China. This forms the larger percentage of the younger people. Its customers range from individuals to business ventures. Osawa (2015) explains that there is a large number of Tencent's customers that uses the services provided by the company in streaming of music.
The customer base for Tencent keeps rising with the introduction of more internet-services. This implies that the company is likely to continue in its business expansion initiatives. Tencent uses customer-oriented strategies in its operations. Value addition is, therefore, customer determined. The technique is useful in ensuring that there is high customer retention.
Employees
Tencent's workforce has been growing over the years. In the year 2014, the company had a total of 27690 employees (Statistica, 2015). Figure 1 below illustrates the constant growth in the number of its employees between 2008 and 2014. From the graphical illustration, it is easy to observe that the company has been steadily increasing its workforce to meet the ever-growing customer base.
The fact that more than half of the company's staff is composed of research and development personnel makes its operations innovation-oriented. Periodic research and development programs are important in facilitating the implementation of new ideas that can influence the quality of services to the company. In addition the customer care services offered by Tencent also satisfies the expectations of the users of its internet services.
Figure 1 Tencent's Employees between 2008 and 2014 (Statistica, 2015)
Competitors
The internet service industry in China is the most competitive ever experienced in the whole world. Tencent's biggest challenger in the industry is Alibaba. Alibaba was officially launched in the year 1999. In the year 2003, Alibaba launched its online business platform, Taobao. The next in its launch was Alipay and a Paypal clone (Gittleson, 2014). The services that Alibaba provides to its customers are the same as those that Tencent also provides to the potential customers.
Tencent's unique services such as QQ instant messenger have the largest number of users in China and other countries (Segers, 2016