Shenzhen October 9 2006 - Tencent announced a plan to build the Tencent Research Institute in China as a platform for researching and developing the company's core technologies. The Tencent Research Institute will focus on predicting future technologies and market developments creating plans for technological developments researching and developing core technologies improving Tencent's technological superiority and capacity for innovation and ultimately improving Internet services for users. According to CEO Ma Huateng Tencent will invest more than CNY 100 million to support the construction of a world-class research institute with a world-class human resource team research platform and innovation environment all in the goal of building high value services for Internet users.

While research institutes are common among international hi-tech enterprises which need to ensure their capacity for technological innovations the Tencent Research Institute is China's first organization of its kind independently established by a domestic Internet enterprise.

Tencent revealed the company's plans to build branch institutes in Beijing Shanghai and Shenzhen to allow it to cooperate closely with China's top colleges and universities as well as with leading scientific and technological research organizations. The institute will be devoted to six core research fields namely: storage technologies data mining multimedia Chinese language processing distributed network and information security. Education experts commented that Tencent's strengthened cooperation with the academic world will not only help the company stay on top of research and development directions related to the latest technologies but also foster excellent undergraduate and graduate researchers. By helping colleges and universities transform their research efforts into practical applications the company can help improve China's capacity for independent innovations in the Internet sector.

CEO Ma describes the culture of the Tencent Research Institute as embodied in the acronym "CPEI" which stands for Cooperation (both within Tencent and between Tencent and universities/colleges) Practicality (research that focuses on studying practical and essential technologies) Exploring (fundamental research and development of new fields of study) and Innovation (innovative applications of technologies and products). Ma stated that he expected the institute to grow over the next few years to become one of the world's leading research institutes of Internet technologies.