Tencent’s unique approach to partners enables greater opportunities in Malaysia

“Different partners come to us with different requests and with different outcomes. And so, we take a different approach to work with them in different ways,” says Kenneth Siow, General Manager of Singapore and Malaysia for Tencent Cloud.

Tencent recently opened its new office in Kuala Lumpur. Capable of supporting up to 500 employees, the new office reflects the Chinese tech company’s continuous growth in the country since starting operations way back in 2013.

Today, Tencent offers a variety of products and services that cater to both consumers and enterprises. With the aim of deepening its cloud and AI innovation in the country, Tencent is also offering collaboration opportunities for advanced tech, digital human and Palm AI, among other services.

While services like Weixin Pay have seen a threefold uptick for seamless cross border payments in Malaysia, Tencent Cloud is also looking to grow its reach by working with government agencies, enterprises and SMBs.

Supporting AI demand

During a media briefing recently, Kenneth Siow, General Manager of Singapore and Malaysia for Tencent Cloud, said they’ve definitely seeing huge growth in the digital economy for Internet companies, where companies are using the Internet to build their business models.

“One successful example is Shopee (e-commerce platform). They started from ground zero; they leveraged the Internet to build their entire business. We think that that's going to continue to grow, especially in Malaysia, where you have greater access to infrastructure in terms of Internet capabilities of reducing latency. So, we're going to see more companies, both big and small, tapping onto the Internet economy. And what that practically means is that we will see many companies driving much more e-commerce or e-retailing type behaviors,” said Siow.

Siow also mentioned that Tencent expects to see a lot more successful use cases that have been deployed in a country like China available locally. For example, live commerce, whereby video capabilities are combined with retail to drive e-commerce experience.

“We're going to see much more or greater adoption of these technologies. Simply because the cost of adopting this is going to be reduced over time. And also, the use cases will become much more mature. We're also seeing growth in many other sectors as they embrace AI capabilities. We believe AI will be the next wave in terms of how technology companies enable both traditional and digital native companies to leapfrog into the AI revolution,” explained Siow.

For example, companies will look into areas that they can address to solve a particular problem. He added that Tencent is now seeing many traditional enterprises looking to transform a particular new product contact center, especially on how they run a contact center with AI.

“Customers are asking us if they layer it with the next GenAI or AI agents, whereby we can automate some of these workflows, provide multi-languages capabilities, and drive efficiency instead of hiring a lot of people. So, we're seeing AI being adopted in many of these industries, including healthcare. We're seeing a huge demand for and requesting information in the healthcare sector. Also, in the media space, we're seeing a lot of uptakes in terms of how we can help them to take them on the next wave of the journey,” added Siow.

For Siow, the key in leveraging AI is driving the adoption of the Internet for better outcomes and driving new business models.

Role of partners

Given the uptake of AI among Malaysian organizations, Siow also pointed out that Tencent’s channel partners play an important role and come in many forms and shapes.

With over 400 products available, Tencent’s growth is also contributed significantly by its extensive partner ecosystem in the country. Among key partners in the country that are going beyond just reselling Tencent products are Ramssol Group Berhad and OpenSys.

“Some partners are focusing more on software development while some partners are focusing more on reselling. Some partners are sort of on a hybrid model. We take a very pragmatic and practical approach to look at where the journey of the partner is and what sort of support that they will need in order to help them to be successful,” explained Siow.

For example, Siow said that some partners approach Tencent with strong customer relationships but lack capabilities. They would like to help sell the product as they bring the right opportunities. Siow explained that this becomes more of a resell model.

At the same time, he said there are also partners that have a lot of development capabilities, whereby they can develop offerings around Tencent’s core products. These partners help make Tencent products more flavorful to customers.

“Different partners come to us with different requests and with different outcomes. And so, we take a different approach to working with them in different ways. But ultimately, with the objective of helping our customers to be successful in their digital journey,” concluded Siow.