Worldwide Markets Feel Jolt of Tencent's Epic $143 Billion Stock Crash

[btarunr]

Tencent Holdings, China's second most valuable tech firm after Alibaba, was mauled at the markets Tuesday (31/07), with its share value dropping 25 percent from its January peak. This translates to a stunning USD $143 billion (yes, billion) in investor wealth being wiped out. The crash has had a domino effect on tech stocks worldwide, as FANG block member Facebook lost an equally stunning $136 billion in market value, over the past three trading sessions. Apparently, buzzwords of the season such as AI and big-data aren't proving enough to keep investors interested in tech stocks as many are beginning to question the stability of the tech industry. All eyes are now on Tencent's August 15 release of its Q2-2018 financial results.



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[the54thvoid]

Imaginary money wiped from imaginary balance books. My heart bleeds.

 

[Vayra86]

And another tech bubble bursting. What else is new. This has been happening for as long as I read the news...

On to the next one!

 

[Capitan Harlock]

Someone pressed a button as always.

 

[GlacierNine]

that all is just crazy as i don't even have or use fakebook but i could hit you with about 50 factual links to what I have said above but why bother as it is not purely the topic...nice try at trolling....lol

Please, by all means, provide these links, I would love to read them.

 

[sepheronx]

Can someone explain to me how Facebook is worth so much? What does it provide that others like Myspace or VK doesn't?

These numbers must be made up.

 

[Fourstaff]

Can someone explain to me how Facebook is worth so much? What does it provide that others like Myspace or VK doesn't?

These numbers must be made up.

That is a value we (anyone who participates in capitalism) have collectedly decide to assign to the company. So yes, its is made up by us.

 

[Xpect]

This article can't be right. According to studies by the Allianz insurance there was 2016 a worldwide capital of in total 170 Billion Euros. Which ist still below the 300 Billion purported here.

 

[GlacierNine]

Can someone explain to me how Facebook is worth so much? What does it provide that others like Myspace or VK doesn't?

These numbers must be made up.

Simple. Facebook is where the people are.

When your business is to essentially sell people's data and develop and sell tools to analyse and use that data, your entire value is in two things:

1 - How much data do you have?
2 - How effectively can that data be used?

We often focus on how large companies buy this data from facebook and use it to target advertising, and that IS where facebook makes their money, but there's a second type of consumer on facebook itself: The users.

Any given user on Facebook, even though they're paying nothing, they're still "buying" the same things.

They want their friends - which means the data they want to "buy" is data about their friends. Facebook has more of that than anyone else, so point 1 is satisfied better by Facebook than say, VK. (At least outside of Russia/Eastern Europe, where VK is more popular)

They also want to be able to browse their friend's profiles easily and efficiently, which is, admittedly, one of facebook's weak points - their user experience is terrible.

The thing is that for the user's part, they also cannot "vote with their wallet", since by using the service, they are consuming the product of point 1 - The data they want is messages from their friends, their pages, groups, photos, etc.

If they want to vote with their wallet, then either someone else needs to provide the same product, or they need to willingly give up access to that product.

Competing services like myspace simply don't have what facebook users want to "buy" - their friends data. That means people can't begin to migrate away from facebook, without accepting an inferior service from a competitor - even if the competitor is technologically and ethically many many times better than facebook - the technology is worthless without userbase to power it!

Until or unless facebook capitulates completely, this will remain the case, with people trapped inside their platform regardless of the technical superiority of competing options.

One potential approach would be for a competing service to use facebook as a source of data, collect it and then aggregate it from many social media sites, into only one - The problem with doing that is that facebooks terms and conditions, and their API, wouldn't allow this. Anyone who tried would be sued into oblivion unless they were quite clever about how it was done.

 

[sepheronx]

I want in on this data stealing money.

Who wants to make a Facebook ourselves? We need a catchy name though.

 

[GlacierNine]

I want in on this data stealing money.

Who wants to make a Facebook ourselves? We need a catchy name though.

I know you're joking, but the entire point of my post is that this isn't possible. If you are Facebook, your product is people's data. Your price for accessing that data, is that the customer spends their time and effort making an account and adding their friends, liking pages, etc.

Let's pretend for a second that we can measure data with a universal unit of measurement we can all agree on - like MHz. (Let's call it, the MegaHombrez, there is of course also the GigaHombrez and TeraHombrez, and the KiloHombrez)

That makes Facebook's advertisements look like this:

Facebook: "For the low, low price of $0 + 2 hours per day, we can offer you access to 500,000 GHz"

Now, you make a new social network, get a decent number of users onboard and go advertising for more people to join. You've made your social network twice as easy to use as facebook is. A huge improvement, surely nobody can resist an offer like a social network that is twice as easy to use as facebook, right?

Well, here's your advertisement:

"For the low, low price of $0 + 1 hour a day, we can offer you 5,000 GHz"

Clearly, then, the competing service, despite being twice as efficient and easy to use, presents a terrible value to the consumer - They're putting in 50% of the time, but only getting 1% of the GHz.

As a result, people will still choose to use Facebook. Why wouldn't they? The value/hour is 100 times what yours is. The more they use Facebook, the more of their data Facebook has, and the further behind any competitor is, before they even start.

The only way around this is to provide forms of data that Facebook doesn't provide - This is LinkedIn's business model - they provide professional data rather than personal, and as a result they occupy a niche of their own.

But simply competing with Facebook head-on? That's literally not possible at this point. At least, not if you were to do it in a fair and legal way. They operate in an environment where success in the past, quite literally guarantees success in the future unless the market changes in such a way that their product becomes obsolete, or the law forces them out of business.

 

[sepheronx]

hey now, I see trends all my life. Before facebook there was something else. Facebook didn't invent anything, just re-invented the wheel. It just appealed to people just like something else will eventually.

I was joking of course.

 

[GlacierNine]

hey now, I see trends all my life. Before facebook there was something else. Facebook didn't invent anything, just re-invented the wheel. It just appealed to people just like something else will eventually.

I was joking of course.

You say that, but Facebook is already 14 years old. It's not a trend. It's a longstanding, successful business, by any financial standards.

I also don't agree that they merely reinvented the wheel. I think that's massively selling short exactly how different the social media business model actually is to traditional business models.

Facebook's business model is practically wizardry - Take into account the following:

Product = Data
Price = User time investment
Sales = Number of users.

They've managed to create a circumstance where having more product increases it's price, increasing the price increases the sales, and increasing the sales increases the amount of product they actually have to sell in the first place. Every part of that is insane in a scarcity-based economy.

The only thing missing is actual dollars.

So where do the dollars come from? Well, all of this is financed by the fact that this is only the "Retail sales" side of their operation - the actual revenue stream for their business model is their Business To Business sales, where the price is determined by the amount of product available to sell, but the same product can be sold an infinite number of times, with a huge service charge tacked on in return for help actually using the product. Which is also insane.

I am not aware of any time in recorded history where it has actually been possible for a business to do anything remotely like this, and the fact Facebook have cornered the market using such a business model, that literally gets stronger over time solely by virtue of already being the strongest player in the market, is something that the world is, quite simply, not legally or even morally, equipped to handle in any way. It is utter madness, and at this stage, the only thing that can kill Facebook is Facebook, or legislation that outlaws what Facebook does.

 

[ironwolf]

Imaginary money wiped from imaginary balance books. My heart bleeds.

I believe you meant your imaginary heart bleeding imaginary blood?

 

[Vayra86]

I am not aware of any time in recorded history where it has actually been possible for a business to do anything remotely like this, and the fact Facebook have cornered the market using such a business model, that literally gets stronger over time solely by virtue of already being the strongest player in the market, is something that the world is, quite simply, not legally or even morally, equipped to handle in any way. It is utter madness, and at this stage, the only thing that can kill Facebook is Facebook, or legislation that outlaws what Facebook does.

Well.. Google was doing it quite a bit longer than FB. Just from a different angle. We search for how long with that engine? Nothing can surpass or resist that push. And if there is a competitor offering a similar service with something unique to it, they buy it, such as DuckDuckGo.

Microsoft is also doing it, from an OS point of view, except they are past their prime - but in the business segment? They still reign supreme and continue doing so, happily converting everything into SaaS and cloud.

In the end the mechanism is just good old monopoly and consolidation. The effect is just a lot stronger because its online and free of charge. Low barrier of entry + high barrier to escape it. You can also compare Facebook's dominance to petrol versus electric cars. Without a large userbase, the latter will never take off, but it will never get that userbase unless you can actually use it everywhere.

 

[Readlight]

youtube news channels are full now whit market crash (world alternative, money gps, dw documentary) you can't make money anymore from hard work.

 

[Gasaraki]

Can someone explain to me how Facebook is worth so much? What does it provide that others like Myspace or VK doesn't?

These numbers must be made up.

Please do a little research on what Facebook actually owns before commenting.

 

[FordGT90Concept]

Can someone explain to me how Facebook is worth so much? What does it provide that others like Myspace or VK doesn't?

These numbers must be made up.

Facebook's business is gossip. Their shares are tanking because they want to get behind the European privacy initiative which, to Wall Street, means less valuable gossip; ergo, their business is worth less (a lot less). Facebook is right up there with Google in terms of web advertising/marketing.

Well.. Google was doing it quite a bit longer than FB. Just from a different angle. We search for how long with that engine? Nothing can surpass or resist that push. And if there is a competitor offering a similar service with something unique to it, they buy it, such as DuckDuckGo.

Google only had queries and traffic to work off of. Facebook, people were gushing their heart and soul out to (photos, video, daily patterns, who this person knows, what this person likes, etc.). There's no anonymity either when dealing with Facebook. Last time I checked, about 2/7 of the world population had a Facebook account. Google has little success outside of West.

This article can't be right. According to studies by the Allianz insurance there was 2016 a worldwide capital of in total 170 Billion Euros. Which ist still below the 300 Billion purported here.

Sure that isn't trillion?

 

[R-T-B]

Imaginary money wiped from imaginary balance books. My heart bleeds.

I mean, the money cited here is real stock purchases and sales, unfortunately.

 

[bonehead123]

DIE scavengers, DIE, in the same but opposite bloody, contourted, convoluted death spiral that was used to climb to their capitalist-pig mountains

 

[Rockarola]

DIE scavengers, DIE, in the same but opposite bloody, contourted, convoluted death spiral that was used to climb to their capitalist-pig mountains

Whoa, you seem angry!
Sounds like you need a hug and I'm a pretty good hugger.
C'mere, have some hairy man loving, I promise to keep it platonic ;-)

 

[StrayKAT]

Can someone explain to me how Facebook is worth so much? What does it provide that others like Myspace or VK doesn't?

These numbers must be made up.

Don't conceive of them as a "social networking" company and then it'll make sense to you.

Just like Google isn't actually a Search or even a Tech company, when it comes down to it.

The "social" bit is only a means to an end. Just like Google products. i.e. They're Advertising companies.

 

[Prima.Vera]

Capitalism and it's imaginary money...

 

[sepheronx]

nvm, not worth the effort.

 

[DeathtoGnomes]

What is the stock symbol for this company? TCTZF?