騰訊vs.阿里巴巴:中國科技界主導權之爭

BEIJING — Forget Google versus Facebook. Forget Uber versus Lyft. Forget Amazon versus … well, everybody.

北京——忘掉谷歌和Facebook之爭吧。忘掉Uber和Lyft之爭吧。忘掉亞馬遜和……嗯，每個人的爭奪吧。

The technology world’s most bruising battle for supremacy is taking place in China. And it could point to Big Tech’s future everywhere else, too.

科技界對主導權最激烈的爭奪正在中國展開。它也可能預示着其他地方科技巨頭的未來。

Tencent Holdings and the Alibaba Group are ratcheting up their no-holds-barred contest to dominate the ways 770 million internet users communicate, shop, get around, entertain themselves and even invest their savings and visit the doctor.

騰訊控股和阿里巴巴集團正在升級一場沒有限制的競爭，主導7.7億網民交流、購物、出行、娛樂，甚至投資儲蓄、看病的方式。

The two titans long ago branched out from their core businesses — games and social media for Tencent, e-commerce for Alibaba — to duke it out in ever more realms of Chinese life. They have competed in messaging, microblogging and delivering takeout. They go head-to-head in video streaming and cloud computing.

從很久以前起，這兩大巨頭的爭鬥就已經從自己的核心業務——騰訊是遊戲和社交媒體，阿里巴巴是電子商務——擴展到了中國人生活的其他領域。他們在短信、微博和外賣領域展開了競爭。它們在視頻流媒體和雲計算領域針鋒相對。

Today, their fiercest fight is over digital money kept on smartphones. Mobile payments have transformed the Chinese economy. Both giants, plus Ant Financial, an Alibaba sister firm, are spending big to gobble up pieces of the action.

如今，它們爭奪得最激烈的是智能手機上的數字貨幣。移動支付已經改變了中國的經濟。這兩大巨頭，再加上阿里巴巴的姐妹公司螞蟻金服，正在斥巨資吞下更多的份額。

China’s internet powerhouses stand at the forefront of the nation’s galloping high-tech progress — a surge that has been brought into sharp focus by the Trump administration’s efforts to counter it. On one hand, the standoff over the Chinese telecom equipment maker ZTE has exposed, to many in China, the degree to which the country still lags in core technologies such as microchips.

中國的互聯網巨頭站在該國飛速發展的高科技進步的前沿，特朗普政府爲應對這一趨勢所做的努力更是使其成爲人們關注的焦點。一方面，中國電信設備製造商中興通訊的僵局已經讓很多中國人看到，中國在微芯片等核心技術方面依然非常落後。

But in the internet realm, China still offers a spooky potential vision of the future, one in which online behemoths like Tencent and Alibaba become the gatekeepers to the entire economy, wielding immense power over traditional industries and becoming very, very rich in the process.

但在互聯網領域，中國在未來依然擁有可怕的潛力，到那時，騰訊和阿里巴巴等互聯網巨頭將成爲整個經濟的看門人，對傳統行業擁有巨大權力，並在這個過程中變得極其富有。

At a conference in December in the Chinese city of Guangzhou, Tencent’s chief executive, Pony Ma, said he felt that the two companies were competing in “too many” areas.

去年12月，在中國廣州的一次會議上，騰訊的首席執行官馬化騰表示，他覺得這兩家公司競爭的領域“太多了”。

“Sometimes I think, ‘Ah, we’re competing in this now, too? All right then,’” Mr. Ma said, chuckling. “It’s a little frustrating.”

“有時候多到我可能每天想，‘啊，這個也競爭？啊，好吧，’”馬化騰笑着說。“有時候是有一點困擾。”

A duopoly this broad could not be easily replicated in the United States. Entrenched competitors and the threat of government intervention generally keep the likes of Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook from expanding pell-mell into adjacent businesses. All of them have sprawled and overlapped mightily, but Amazon, with its forays into groceries, pharmacies, health care and more, might be the furthest along toward creating an inescapable commercial universe.

如此廣泛的雙頭壟斷在美國很難輕鬆複製。根深蒂固的競爭者，加上政府幹預的威脅，通常會導致蘋果(Apple)、亞馬遜、谷歌和Facebook等公司無法倉促地擴展到相鄰的業務領域。所有這些公司都在不斷擴張，業務高度重合，但隨着亞馬遜進軍雜貨店、藥店和醫療保健等行業，它可能在創造誰都無法逃避的商業世界的道路上走得最遠。

Still, with the European Union enacting tough new privacy laws, and some in the United States eager to follow, Google and Facebook could soon be forced to find ways to make money beyond selling users’ personal information to advertisers, said Raj Rajgopal, president of digital business strategy at Virtusa Corporation, a consulting firm.

不過，諮詢公司Virtusa Corporation負責數字商業策略的總裁拉傑·拉傑格帕爾(Raj Rajgopal)表示，隨着歐盟制定嚴格的新隱私法，美國的某些州也渴望效仿，谷歌和Facebook可能很快會被迫尋找向廣告商出售用戶個人信息之外的其他盈利途徑。

“As profitability reduces, they’ll say, ‘Now I need to monetize my customer base,’” Mr. Rajgopal said. “The innovation we’re seeing in China could be seen in the U.S. in the next three to five years,” he added. “Customers are demanding that.”

“隨着盈利能力下降，他們會說，‘現在，我需要利用客戶羣營利，’”拉傑格帕爾說。“我們在中國看到的創新，可能會在未來三到五年內出現在美國，”他還說，“客戶在提出這樣的要求”。

China’s internet titans have a powerful ally found nowhere else, though: the Chinese government. Tencent and Alibaba have avoided antimonopoly clampdowns by staying in Beijing’s good graces, said Hu Wenyou, a partner at the Beijing law firm Yingke. Their sheer size also makes them easier for the authorities to control. They simply have too much to lose.

中國的互聯網巨頭擁有獨一無二的強大盟友：中國政府。北京盈科律師事務所的合夥人胡文友表示，騰訊和阿里巴巴在北京庇護之下避免了反壟斷的限制。它們龐大的規模有利於當局進行控制。它們有太多利益在裏面了。

“If you can become so big, and so successful in so many areas, this in itself shows that you must have maintained very good, very friendly relations with the government,” Mr. Hu said.

“如果你能做到這麼大而且在衆多領域都這麼成功，這本身就說明了你肯定和政府的關係保持得很好、很融洽，”胡文友說。

Neither giant is done getting bigger.

兩個巨頭都沒有停止擴張。

Each has a market capitalization of close to $500 billion, making them among the most highly valued technology firms on the planet. Google and Facebook still claim more users, but the Chinese heavyweights arguably do more — and more, and more — for theirs.

兩家公司的市值都接近5000億美元，使它們進入世界最具價值科技公司之列。谷歌和Facebook仍然擁有更多用戶，但是中國的重量級公司似乎可以爲用戶做到更多——多了太多。

They have both funded ventures that offer online education, make electric cars and rent out bicycles. For the giants, such initiatives represent new opportunities for people to use their digital wallets — Ant Financial’s Alipay and Tencent’s WeChat Pay — and new ways to collect data on consumer behavior. Analysts at Sanford C. Bernstein counted 247 investment deals by Tencent in recent years and 156 by Alibaba, though given the pace of the companies’ deal-making, they said their database was “likely to be perennially incomplete.”

它們都在投資提供在線教育、生產電動汽車和租用自行車的企業。對於這些巨頭來說，這些創舉爲人們使用它們的數字錢包——螞蟻金服的支付寶和騰訊的微信支付——提供了新的機會，也令它們得到收集消費者行爲數據的新方法。桑福德·C·伯恩斯坦(Sanford C. Bernstein)的分析師統計，騰訊近年來投資了247筆交易，阿里巴巴投資了156筆，但考慮到兩家公司的交易速度，他們表示，他們的數據庫“可能永遠不會完整”。

The latest battleground? Brick-and-mortar stores. Alibaba has spent great sums — $2.9 billion on a supermarket chain, $2.6 billion on a department store and mall operator — to conquer the real world. Tencent has followed suit with its own retail partnerships and investments. Walmart recently said it would no longer accept Alipay in its stores in western China, in a victory for Tencent.

最新的戰場？實體店。阿里巴巴斥巨資以圖征服現實世界，它向一個連鎖超市投資29億美元，向一個百貨和購物中心運營商投資26億美元。騰訊也隨之發展自己的零售商合作與投資。沃爾瑪最近表示，它在中國西部的商店將不再接受支付寶付款，這是騰訊取得的一個勝利。

Once the companies have locked people into their payment systems, they can become the enablers of commerce and financial services of even more kinds. In a sign of investors’ excitement about the possibilities, Ant Financial is making plans to go public, in a blockbuster stock offering that could give the company a market value larger than Goldman Sachs’s.

一旦這些公司將人們鎖定在它們的支付系統中，它們就可以成爲更多類型的商業與金融服務的推動者。螞蟻金服正在制定上市計劃，推動一個可給公司帶來比高盛(Goldman Sachs)的市值還高的大型股票發行，這是投資者對這種可能性感到興奮的跡象。

China has become a model for tech’s world-swallowing tendencies partly out of circumstance.

科技公司有吞噬一切的傾向，這種傾向部分是脫離環境的，中國已經成了這方面的典型。

With the country’s high-speed churn of well-funded start-ups, planting flags on new turf is often the only way for large players not to be constantly losing ground.

資金充足的中國初創企業在高速運作，在新的地盤上圈地往往是大型操盤手保證自己不會經常失地的唯一途徑。

“The whole China internet market is way more competitive than the U.S. market,” said Xiaoyan Wang, an analyst at 86Research in Shanghai. “Everyone is trying to expand their presence in every sector.”

“整個中國互聯網市場比美國市場更具競爭力，”八六研究(86Research)駐上海分析師王筱琰表示。“每個人都試圖在各個領域擴大影響力。”

Also, both Alibaba and Tencent have struggled to make much money outside their home market. That means their surest way to keep growing is to get more deeply involved in more areas of their Chinese users’ lives.

此外，阿里巴巴和騰訊都費了很大力氣在本國市場以外賺更多錢。這意味着它們保持增長的最可靠方式是更深入地參與中國用戶生活的更多領域。

Those lives are riper for tech disruption than lives in the West. In China, small stores dominate retail. Hospitals are crowded and doctors overworked. Most people do not have credit cards. These are easier business opportunities for Alibaba and Tencent than they would be for Amazon or Facebook.

中國人的生活比西方人的生活更適合迎接科技的顛覆。在中國，小商店主宰零售領域。醫院人滿爲患，醫生超負荷工作。大多數人沒有信用卡。這令阿里巴巴和騰訊比亞馬遜或Facebook更容易獲得商機。

In a report this week, Morgan Stanley predicted that by 2027, the total market in China in which Alibaba could be making money will be worth $19 trillion — more than Amazon’s potential market worldwide.

在本週的一份報告中，摩根士丹利(Morgan Stanley)預測，到2027年，阿里巴巴可能賺錢的中國市場總值將達19萬億美元，超過亞馬遜的全球潛在市場。

At the moment, both Chinese giants are hustling to find more ways for people to transact using their wallet and not the other’s. Alibaba’s shopping sites and physical stores do not allow users to pay for stuff with WeChat. Tencent-backed companies, such as the retailer or the service platform Meituan-Dianping, either downplay Alipay as a payment option in their apps or do not accept it at all.

目前，兩家中國巨頭都在忙於尋找更多方式，讓人們使用自己的數字錢包進行交易，而不是對方的錢包。阿里巴巴的購物網站和實體店不允許用戶使用微信支付。騰訊支持的公司，如零售商京東或服務平臺美團-大衆點評，要麼將支付寶作爲其應用程序的次一等支付選擇，要麼根本不接受它。

Whether any of this will give either camp an enduring lead in payments is unclear. Eric Wen, the founder of Blue Lotus Research Institute, expects them to end up at roughly 50-50.

這些舉措是否會給兩個陣營帶來持久的領先優勢，目前還不清楚。藍蓮花研究機構(Blue Lotus Research Institute)的創始人溫天立預計，它們最終將大致打成平手。

The payments contest will at least propel both companies to keep expanding their kingdoms, including overseas. Alibaba is pouring billions of dollars into online shopping ventures in India and Southeast Asia. Tencent is backing start-ups around the world that have even a distant chance of enriching its ecosystem.

支付競賽至少會推動兩家公司不斷擴大它們的王國，包括海外。阿里巴巴正在向印度和東南亞的網上購物企業注資數十億美元。世界各地的創業公司只要有一絲豐富其生態系的機會，騰訊就會投資。

George Favvas did not know too much about Tencent before it invested in his company in San Francisco, Circle Medical, whose app lets users summon doctors on demand. He also had no specific plans to take his business to China in the near future, if ever.

喬治·法瓦斯(George Favvas)之前並不瞭解騰訊的情況，直到騰訊投資了他在舊金山的循環醫療(Circle Medical)公司，該公司的應用程序可讓用戶按需求召喚醫生。同時他也沒有近期內將業務拓展到中國的計劃，也許永遠不會。

“My first question was, ‘Why are you interested in us?’” Mr. Favvas said.

“我的第一個問題是，‘你們爲什麼對我們感興趣？’”法瓦斯說。

He gets it now, he says. “They’re just such a big player, and health care is so broken,” Mr. Favvas said. Tencent, he added, is interested in health care for the same reasons companies like Amazon and Apple are.

他說，現在他明白了。“他們實在是太龐大的一個玩家，而醫保系統又這麼差勁，”法瓦斯說。他還說騰訊對醫療保健領域感興趣的原因和亞馬遜與蘋果等公司是一樣的。

“If anything, they’re a couple of years ahead.”

“只不過，他們領先幾年。”