国内四处出击的腾讯风投，在美国市场为何悄无声息

    两年前，中国腾讯公司似乎将在美国全面出击。这家社交媒体与在线游戏业巨头，在美国招募大学生宣传其社交网络微信，还以1.5亿美元入股纽约设计网站Fab.com。此外，有传言称，腾讯参与了Snapchat的一轮融资，对这家没有任何收入的初创公司的估值高达40亿美元！

    索尼公司被黑客泄漏的电子邮件显示，Snapchat的交易并未成功。如今，腾讯已经成为中国最大的风险投资公司之一，《财富》杂志在本期详细介绍了腾讯雄心勃勃的战略，风险投资就是其中之一。然而，腾讯进军美国的热情早已消失。

    腾讯并未参与Snapchat在3月份的最新一轮融资（阿里巴巴参与了融资，投资2亿美元），该公司在美国的交易大多集中于游戏公司和在中国有成长潜力的小型初创公司。相反，阿里巴巴却已经成为硅谷关注的中国公司。去年，除了参与Snapchat融资外，阿里巴巴先后在Shoprunner投资2亿美元，在Lyft投资2.5亿美元，信息服务TangoMe获得了阿里巴巴领投的2.8亿美元投资，而且阿里巴巴还在美国启动了云服务。（由于销售疲软，阿里巴巴卖掉了一年前在美国开设的一家精品电子商务网站。）

    去年，腾讯共参与了48笔投资，价值60亿美元，其在国内的影响力与日俱增，但这也使美国战略的不足更加清晰可见。曾在华多年的风险投资家史蒂芬·贝尔表示：“进入美国，将是他们需要解决的一个难题。”

    腾讯的美国办事处距离斯坦福大学校园不远，由网大为(David Wallerstein)负责。他曾供职于腾讯最早的投资者之一，南非媒体公司Naspers，于2001年加入腾讯。网大为和腾讯进行了一些小规模投资，有时候仅为数百万美元，投资的公司包括提供机器学习服务的Scaled Inference。这家公司联合创始人兼CEO奥尔坎·瑟希欧格鲁在谷歌工作过十多年，他从腾讯获得了种子资金，甚至在帕洛阿尔托寻找办公室时也得到过腾讯的帮助。他说：“他们在寻找一家更有野心的初创公司。”

    但野心并不意味着庞大。纪源资本管理合伙人童士豪表示：“他们并没有那么咄咄逼人，他们正在做一些小投资。”纪源资本在中美两国开展投资业务。腾讯近期的投资并未像阿里巴巴一样获得关注，似乎腾讯也不关心能否在美国市场站稳脚跟。腾讯拒绝了多次与其投资活动有关的采访请求。

    微信在中国取得了巨大成功，用户数量近5亿人，但在美国却遭遇失败，因为结果证明，很少有美国人愿意放弃Facebook或Instagram。有分析人士表示，腾讯在美国取得的唯一一次重大成功，是在2011年以2.3亿美元收购Riot Games。这家位于洛杉矶的在线游戏公司只有一款游戏——《英雄联盟》，但它却是全世界最受欢迎的电脑游戏，每月玩家人数近7000万人。有报道称，随着这款多人对战游戏的持续成功，2013年，该公司的销售额达到6.2亿美元。

    腾讯的其他投资也可能带来回报。童士豪表示：“这些小规模投资使得他们对新兴的移动领域动态有了更直接的了解。未来三至五年，事情会变得非常有趣。”

    至少有一个领域，腾讯在美国进行了大规模投资：将内容引进中国。腾讯与NBA、华纳兄弟和HBO签署了协议，引进内容供腾讯视频网站上数以亿级的观众们观看。熟悉两家公司的消息源告诉《财富》杂志，美国职业棒球大联盟的数字部门对与腾讯的合作也非常感兴趣。其发言人拒绝评论此事。

    马克·扎克伯格从不掩饰将Facebook扩张到中国的野心。中国市场目前被腾讯占领，其销售额与利润与Facebook持平。与此同时，腾讯却并没有Facebook那样的野心，目前还没有通过有意义的方式离开其大本营的打算。（财富中文网）

    译者：刘进龙/汪皓

    审校；任文科

    Two years ago, it looked like China’s Tencent was about to break out in America. The social media and online games giant had recruited university students in the U.S. to promote its social network WeChat. It had joined a $150 million deal for a stake in the New York design site Fab.com. It was also rumored to be part of a fundraising round for Snapchat that would have valued the young startup without a lick of revenue at—gasp!—$4 billion.

    The Snapchat deal never happened, as leaked emails from the Sony hack later showed. And today, even as Tencent has become one of the biggest venture capitalists in China, as part of an ambitious strategy that Fortune details in its current issue, the excitement surrounding Tencent’s U.S. moves has all but evaporated.

    Tencent didn’t join Snapchat’s latest fundraising round in March (though rival Alibaba did, to the tune of $200 million), and its U.S. deals have mostly focused on game companies and small startups that could potentially grow in Tencent’s home country. In contrast, Alibaba has become the Chinese company to watch in Silicon Valley. Last year, in addition to the Snapchat funding, it invested $200 million in Shoprunner, invested $250 million in Lyft, led a $280 million investment round in messaging-service TangoMe, and opened a cloud services business in the U.S. (It also sold a boutique U.S. e-commerce site it had opened just a year earlier, after weak sales.)

    As Tencent’s profile rises in China—last year, it invested in 48 deals worth $6 billion—the lack of a complementary U.S. strategy is even more apparent. “That’s their hard problem—getting into the U.S.,” says Stephen Bell, a former venture capitalist in China who recently moved back to the U.S.

    Tencent’s U.S. office, not far from Stanford’s campus, is led by David Wallerstein, who joined the company in 2001 from Tencent’s earliest investor, the South African media company Naspers. Wallerstein and Tencent have made small investments, sometimes for only a few million dollars, in companies like Scaled Inference, which offers machine learning as a service. Scaled Inference co-founder and CEO Olcan Sercinoglu, who worked at Google for more than 10 years, received seed funding from Tencent and even some help finding an office in Palo Alto. “They were looking for a more ambitious startup,” he says.

    But ambitious, in this case and others, didn’t mean big. “They’re not that aggressive—they are doing small things,” says Hans Tung, managing partner at GGV Capital, a venture capital firm with investments in the U.S. and China. None of Tencent’s recent investments have captured the same kind of attention as Alibaba’s, nor does it seem that Tencent cares about creating a foothold in the American market. Tencent declined multiple requests for interviews about its investments.

    WeChat, a huge success in China with a half-billion users, flopped in the U.S. after it turned out few Americans wanted to ditch Facebook or Instagram. The only major U.S. success Tencent has had, say some analysts, is their acquisition of Riot Games for $230 million in 2011. The Los Angeles-based online game company has only one product, League of Legends, but it is the most popular computer game in the world, with around 70 million monthly players. The company reportedly earned $620 million in sales in 2013 as the multi-player battle game continued to thrive.

    Tencent’s other investments could still pay off. “All these small bets give them good view of what’s happening in the mobile space in emerging categories,” says Tung. “That will be interesting in three to five years.”

    And Tencent is investing heavily in the U.S. in at least one area: bringing content back to China. It has signed agreements to stream content from the National Basketball Association, Warner Bros., and HBO for a potential audience of hundreds of millions on Tencent’s video site. Major League Baseball’s digital arm has also become interested, a source close to both organizations told Fortune. An MLB spokesperson declined to comment.

    Mark Zuckerberg hasn’t been shy about his desire to expand Facebook to China, a market that Tencent dominates, with sales and profits roughly equal to Facebook’s. Tencent, meanwhile, isn’t nearly as ambitious to leave its home market in a meaningful way.