Chinese tech firms roll out online office services for overseas markets to combat virus
A view of the screenshot of Tencent Meeting app Photo: Courtesy of Tencent
With the coronavirus spreading quickly overseas, a slew of Chinese high-tech firms have joined the league providing online services for overseas markets, where demand for telecommuting and live-stream courses has been on the rise.
Chinese tech giant Tencent has released the international version of its teleconference tool Tencent Meeting, which has been used for free in more than 100 countries and regions, including Japan, Singapore and India, as of Friday, the company said in a statement sent to the Global Times.
Tencent Meeting, which was launched in December by Tencent Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Tencent, has had over 10 million daily active users so far, the company said. It has been expanding computing capacity with the number of users surging during the epidemic as more people need to work from home.
The cloud video tool can offer a way to maintain strong communication with coworkers, clients, partners or anyone who uses the system, which will help enterprises save costs and improve efficiency. The international version can support as many as 300 attendees.
The virus has spread to about 169 countries and regions in less than three months with 209,839 people confirmed with the infection, data from the WHO showed Thursday.
The serious situation in overseas markets has greatly bolstered growth for online tools and it provides opportunities for domestic firms to go global.
In a list of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) recommendations for distance learning solutions, Chinese-developed app DingTalk, the Alibaba-owned chat, videoconferencing and task management tool and ByteDance's remote-work app Lark were named.
In China, DingTalk is being used by 120 million students, while 3.5 million teachers have become anchors in front of streaming cameras.
The platform has developed overseas versions in English and Japanese. Teachers in Japan have started using DingTalk as Tokyo has shut schools until the end of March.
