The professional education service Tencent Ketang, which translates to “classroom” in English, will cease operations on October 1, according to a notice posted on its website, without providing any reason.
While users will no longer be able to access new courses on the platform from August 1, they can still watch lessons that have already been added to their schedules until the site is closed, the notice said.
Shenzhen-based Tencent did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday.
The landing page of the Tencent Ketang website. Photo: Handout
Shuttering the online education service shows Tencent’s focus on its restructuring strategy, about a year and half after founder, chairman and chief executive Pony Ma Huateng said the company must get into a habit of cutting costs and finding core areas, instead of seeking expansion and scale.
“In the past, when we saw others were adding weight, we also tried to increase in size, but what we added was just fat, and we were still unable to defeat others,” Ma said in a December 2022 internal town hall meeting, which was quoted in a report by Chinese media outlet Jiemian.
Tencent’s cost-cutting efforts have included divesting some of its investment portfolio, closing noncore businesses, and consolidating its sprawling operations across social media, video gaming and other market segments amid economic headwinds and a lengthy regulatory crackdown.
Tencent Holdings founder, chairman and chief executive Pony Ma Huateng says the company must focus on its core businesses. Photo: Reuters
Established in 2014, Tencent Ketang worked with various tutoring centres and education organisations across the country to provide both free and paid courses, ranging from English lessons and training for fire engineering certification and civil service examination.
In 2023, Tencent Ketang showed signs of contraction when it discontinued the management tool that helped teachers with course scheduling and transactions, and later only offered free content on its platform.
The service had more than 400,000 vocational training lessons that attracted about 26 million users each month, the company said in 2022. A year earlier, the platform recorded more than 400 million users.
Tencent Holdings remains involved in education technology, as it runs an artificial-intelligence-powered teaching tool. Photos: Shutterstock
Despite shutting down the platform, Tencent remains involved in the education sector with its coding programme for teenagers and an artificial-intelligence-powered teaching tool. The company also offers its technologies to various schools and organisations.
Online education was a booming sector on the mainland during the Covid-19 pandemic, as it provided an alternative to the disrupted lessons in bricks-and-mortar classrooms.
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