BAT is the acronym for the most familiar combination of technology giants in China, where B is Baidu, A is Alibaba and T is Tencent. Baidu has already entered the car industry, while Alibaba is working with SAIC to build IM Motors, and people wonder, what about Tencent?
At the April 26 conference announcing the strategic cooperation between Tencent and Peking University, Dowson Tong, Tencent's senior executive vice president and president of the cloud and intelligent industry group, gave a negative answer, saying Tencent would not build cars but would support them from the software side.
Tong said that Tencent's core competency is "connectivity", so it has not entered the cell phone manufacturing industry in the past and will not build cars in the future, according to a report by The Beijing News.
In China's increasingly hot car-making industry, there are more and more players involved. So far this year, several Chinese tech companies have announced their entry into the car-making industry.
On Jan. 11, Baidu announced that it was forming an electric car company with Geely Automobile to enter the car industry as a full vehicle manufacturer.
At the end of March, Xiaomi Group announced its entry into the car-making sector, with Lei Jun as its car company CEO and an initial investment of RMB 10 billion.
On April 6, LatePost cited multiple independent sources as saying that Chinese car-sharing giant Didi Chuxing has launched a car-making project, headed by Didi Vice President Yang Jun, who is also the chief product officer of Didi's D1, a custom car jointly released with BYD.
On April 9, 36kr cited several industry sources with knowledge of the matter, saying that Xiaomi eco-chain company Roborock has opened a car-making project, with its founder and CEO Chang Jing at the helm personally.
TV manufacturer Skyworth announced on Weibo on April 14 that it will hold a launch event on April 27 at 14:30 Beijing time to discuss "the future of Skyworth's smart cars."
(Source: CnEVPost)
