Tencent versus Alibaba: a complete guide to an increasingly fierce rivalry (INFOGRAPHIC)

Tencent (HKG:0700) is the world’s fourth largest web company, and Alibaba is on the verge of history’s largest tech IPO. Both of these behemoth companies occupy many of the same verticals in China, which is the biggest and possibly most isolated internet ecosystem on Earth.

To summarize the massive product and service war between Tencent and Alibaba, we’ve put together an infographic showing which of their offerings are winning or losing in all of their competing sectors.

We made this list as comprehensive as possible, but there could be a few we missed. Sometimes both companies have a product, but neither is the market leader, or we simply don’t have enough data to pick a winner. Additionally, we decided to leave out verticals where only one of them is active; for example, Alibaba doesn’t have a competing portal to go up against Tencent Video, just as Tencent doesn’t have a counterpart for Alibaba’s B2B ecommerce arm.

That said, we’ve come up with 20 areas that embody the ongoing rivalry between Tencent and Alibaba. All the numerical figures were the latest we could find, mostly from the past 12 months. In the end. Tencent scored 10 wins to Alibaba’s seven with four unknowns. Some verticals are bigger than others, however, and this isn’t a battle to the death. These companies are huge, and both are here to stay for the long run.

March 19, 2014 @17:30 – Updated graphic to reflect most recent WeChat user numbers.

(Editing by Steven Millward)