微信或将与新浪微博上演争夺战
Tencent's WeChat Takes Bite Out of Weibo
腾讯(Tencent)成长迅猛的移动通讯应用“微信”(WeChat)还没有实现盈利，但据竞争对手新浪(Sina Corp.)说，这款应用已经吸引了其他类似平台用户的注意力。
Tencent's fast-growing mobile messaging application WeChat isn't making money yet, but according to rival Sina Corp., the application is already taking user attention away from competitors.
新浪董事长曹国伟在上周五的财报电话会议上说，第三季度用户在新浪微博上停留的时间较第二季度略有下降，原因之一便是微信的竞争。虽然分析师以前也曾将微博与微信之间越来越激烈的竞争视为原因，但曹国伟的话是两家公司第一次给出竞争已经开始的官方暗示。
Speaking during Sina's earnings call on Friday, chairman Charles Chao said that the time users spent on the company's Weibo microblogging platform declined slightly in the third quarter from the second quarter, in part due to competition from WeChat. Though analysts have pointed to rising competition between Weibo and WeChat, Mr. Chao's comment marks the first official indication from either of the companies that the game is on.
2011年年初上线的微信已经拥有2亿多用户，并帮助腾讯吸引了不少中高端用户。这些用户不一定使用腾讯的微博或QQ这款即时通讯工具。
Launched in early 2011, WeChat already has more than 200 million users and has helped Tencent claim a healthy chunk of China's middle- and upper-class users, who do not necessarily use the company's microblog or QQ desktop-computer messenger services.
这意味着腾讯跟新浪构成了直接的竞争，因为新浪微博的用户主要是中国城市的高端人群。据腾讯报告称，腾讯微博用户多于新浪微博，但大多数分析师认为，腾讯微博用户往往是相对不那么富裕，或来自中国较小城市的用户。
That means it is square on Sina's turf, since Sina Weibo is predominantly used by China's urban upper crust. Tencent reports larger user numbers for its own microblogging service than Sina does, but most analysts argue that users of Tencent's Weibo tend to be less wealthy or from smaller cities in China.
在电话会议上，曹国伟力图在新浪微博和腾讯微信的角色之间做一个明确的划分。他说，我想大家都知道，微信和微博可能是目前移动终端上用得最多的两款应用，微博可能更像是一个公开网络，人们公开分享信息，不管他们说什么、发布什么，大家都可以看到，而微信更像是一个私人网络，人们是在朋友之间分享信息内容，相互之间都认识。
During the call, Mr. Chao sought to draw a strong distinction between the roles of Sina's Weibo and Tencent's WeChat (known as Weixin in Chinese): 'I think as everyone knows that Weixin and Weibo are probably the two most popular applications on the mobile terminal right now. Weibo is probably more like a public network, (with) people sharing information publicly, whatever they say or publish can be seen by everybody. But Weixin is more like private network, people sharing information content among friends, and people know each other.'
虽然有这些不同，曹国伟也承认，随着微信越来越流行，它将不可避免地挤占用户在新浪微博上停留的时间，因为每个用户每天可以花在移动社交网络上的时间就那么多。
Despite those differences, Mr. Chao admitted that as WeChat's popularity grows, it will inevitably cut into the amount of time users are putting into Weibo, since every user only has so much time in a day to spend on mobile social networking.
曹国伟说，新浪正在给微博增加私密分享功能，如果用户在意的话，他们也可以像使用微信一样使用微博。但他强调，新浪将继续侧重于核心能力，也就是让它的约4亿用户分享笑话、图片、新闻和他们可能有的其他任何公开想法（如果能躲开越来越敏感的审查者的话）。
Mr. Chao said Sina is adding private sharing to Weibo, so that users can use it more like WeChat if they care to, but he insisted that Sina would continue to focus on its core competency, which is enabling its roughly 400 million registered users to share jokes, photos, news and any other thought they might have publicly (assuming it gets by the service's increasingly trigger-happy censors).
这比开发某种产品跟腾讯竞争更加明智。在过去10年里，腾讯已经证明它是中国即时通讯领域无可争辩的王者。
That's smarter than trying to create something to compete with Tencent, which has over the past decade proven itself to be China's undisputed king of messaging.
由于拥有众多有影响的用户以及十分关心政治的粉丝，新浪微博短时间内可能不会受到腾讯的威胁。但微信直接与腾讯微博而不是新浪微博相连，所以腾讯仍有可能逐步吸引新浪微博的忠实用户到它自己的微博平台上来。
Due to its large numbers of influential users, along with the requisite political junky followers, Sina's Weibo is probably insulated from the Tencent threat in the short term. But WeChat does directly link to Tencent's Weibo, and not to Sina's, making it possible that Tencent could gradually lure faithful Sina Weibo users over to its own microblog.
作为中国互联网业界的真正巨头，腾讯坐拥37亿美元的现金，而新浪只有7亿美元左右。如果广告收入像人们预料的那样随着中国经济的放缓而下降，腾讯凭借其强大的游戏收入流，将拥有强大得多的抵御寒流的能力。
The true goliath of the Chinese Internet, Tencent is sitting on $3.7 billion in cash compared to Sina's roughly $700 million. With its massive gaming revenue stream, it is far better poised to weather an expected dip in advertising revenue due to the country's slowing economy
腾讯早就知道，钱多未必就能吸引到有影响力的用户，但微信这样的应用证明，它正在努力把他们争取过来。目前还是中国移动互联网的初期阶段，但曹国伟的话表明，未来几年可能上演一场事关重大的争夺战。
As Tencent has long known, money doesn't translate into influential users, but applications like WeChat show it's trying to lure them over. It is early days in the development of the mobile Internet in China, but Mr. Chao's comments set up what's likely to be a key battle in the coming years.
WSJ
2012-11-19
WSJ
514次
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