Now that the door is ajar Google are slowly trying to make inroads into the world’s largest market, the Chinese market. Recently we have seen a softening of the Chinese government’s approach to Google although many of it’s services are still blocked. Google are now signalling an upcoming greater push with an agreement with Tencent.
Tencent are the company behind WeChat, China’s largest social media platform, and their largest payment service (WeChat Pay) with over 650 million monthly active user accounts and thus have a lot of Chinese patents that would interest many companies — especially Google.
Reuters are reporting that Google have disclosed they and Tencent have agreed to a patent sharing deal which covers a large range of products and possibly signals an intention to team up for future innovations in China. Google did not reveal how much this deal is worth nor the exact products and patents it covers but did say that:
By working together on agreements such as this, tech companies can focus on building better products and services for their usersMike Lee, Google’s head of patents
It is unclear whether Tencent will now also have access to some of Google’s patents but it would not surprise us if this was the case. Hopefully the two can work together to produce some great new products for us all.
Google’s push into China is significant as it not only gets them a foothold in the Chinese market but also possibly a lot more data with which to improve their AI services. Hopefully this patent deal with Tencent will be used for good and not evil and we can all benefit from it.
