Auto-generated video transcript:
Why Chinese tech Giants are embracing the Metaverse despite state media warnings. That sounds like all the Chinese tech Giants are going against the Chinese government in terms of the Metaverse. So what really is going on there?
Metaverse plans, how advanced are they? How much funding is flowing into the space and who are the main players? And how does this conflict or doesn’t conflict with the Chinese party’s agenda? That’s what I want to talk about today. And yeah, let’s start with this headline.
I mean, this really seems like there’s a lot going on there. Chinese tech Giants are indeed looking heavily at the Metaverse and at the opportunities in the Metaverse. I found one nice statistic here. From September to November 2021, there were 26 domestic Metavers related investments and 35 overseas. So domestic were just ¥10 million.
And overseas one is ¥10 billion compared to the China V our industry, which amounted to 2.1 billion yuan for the full last year. So just these three months have already eclipsed the amount of financing that flowed into the VR and AR industry in terms of what went into Metaverse financing. Now, these kind of statistics, especially in China, you always need to be very careful. I know too many founders who just lied about their rounds, who said instead of we raised a 150,000,000 RMB round, but in reality it was just a 50 million RMB round. You can’t verify these things.
And so when we read statistics like that, we always need to take it with a grain of salt. It could be that this is a little bit off, but at least some of these investments will really have happened. And so that’s quite indicative of the fact that the Metaverse seems to be some kind of thing in China. Now, what players are acting here? Of course, we have the typical suspect.
So Tencent, Baidu, NetEase, Alibaba, By, Dance. These firms are highly active. And when it comes to the Metaverse now, these firms have two possibilities. Either they acquire so they do MNA corporate development, or they build themselves Tencent. We know they have a history of being very active investing, acquiring companies, invested into Wave, a US virtual concert organizer.
Obviously a very intelligent seems like an interesting move into the Metaverse. Tantran does a lot of these things very music related. They have Queue Music, Tencent Group. They plan to enter into the NFT field with this music platform.
They invested into Roblox, they have this gaming studio, TV studio group. So timeframe is really pushing hard into this Metaverse direction, especially in the gaming and music verticals. And it makes sense. I mean, it’s $0.10. So that’s what’s at their core right now by do, they have been all over the web with this thing called Shirang Land of Hope, which is their motiverse.
Land. Okay, so that’s how they call it. Sherung and I’ve seen a couple of pictures. It looks great. But then again, all of these Meta verses that we’re seeing right now look very interesting.
Sierra is more on the realistic side. So you can’t just teleport anywhere, but you take the train and rightfully so. Majie, vice President of Vice I do says the Metaverse is still infancy and there’s still a long way to go. So they are pushing into this direction, but they also acknowledge that it will take some time. That is say basically William Dingley, he said, well, we’re very active in terms of Metavers, doing a lot of different things, but failed to specify what exactly they are doing.
But Net East is one of these players where I think they could really develop as opposed to acquire develop a couple of very relevant technologies and advancement when it comes to the Metaverse. So keeping my eyes on Net ease Alibaba for them is very interesting. I mean, you have these big real estate developers like New World Development Group in Hong Kong who have major problems with their malls because people just don’t go into malls anymore, right. Even in China, where people love to go shopping and all these malls are filled with luxury shops. Right.
But they have problems filling these malls. And so for them, the Metaverse is an interesting playground. Obviously for Alibaba, it’s also because if now you can have an experience shopping on Coach Long Jean and so on through Teamall or Taobao in a very realistic way through the Metaverse. That sounds very interesting. So let’s see what they will do in Bite Dance.
They said they had this VR headset maker acquisition of PECO in August. So by Dance did a lot of moves in the VR AR direction and it’s obviously also active here. Okay. So that kind of seems to be the conclusion. All these players are very active, but then the Chinese government seems to be prohibiting it or they are not really in favor of the Metaverse.
What’s going on? As it turns out, that’s really just the state media. So you had a couple of outlets that basically came out and said a couple of state owned outlets that said, okay, let’s be a bit careful with the Metaverse. I can’t find it anymore.
But you had a couple of outlets coming out and saying, hey, let’s not become too speculative here. The Metaverse is very young. It kind of right now encourages speculation, investing into different Metaverse start ups and ventures, some of which probably don’t have anything to do with the Metaverse. So this feels very bubbly at times. And that’s what the state media outlet basically said.
Let’s be careful here. At the same time, of course, also Chinese government, I mean, they are all over the place when it comes to these new developments. Also, NFTs, right. Have been officially banned. If you search for NFTs and WeChat groups, you will not find it.
Usually it’s N asteriskt. So they don’t spell out the name of NFT because it’s been forbidden, because it allegedly encourages speculation. So now you still have NFTs they’re just not called NFTs long story short, Chinese government is very active here. Chinese government is extremely intelligent. So they would never simply ban the Metaverse.
They will never say, okay, there’s no Metaverse in China, but they know that the Metaverse offers some possibilities for unwanted opinions, unwanted commentaries to spread. And the Metaverse offers a couple of levers that could be dangerous to the Chinese Communist party and very logically. So they don’t want that. So what they are saying and what they are always saying whenever some new technology pops up, what they’re always saying is we are going to do it, but we’re going to regulate the hell out of it. So we’re really going to be careful here.
And sometimes that’s positive. Sometimes that’s negative. It’s not always negative. When some of these technologies are over regulated, sometimes that’s actually quite healthy. And you see that the west now is considering a very similar direction.
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