October 31, Chinese internet giant Tencent Holdings Ltd. (0700.HK), which has China’s largest online user base, is determined to open its platform to third-party developers for more social games and e-commerce applications, local tech portal donews.com reported on Monday, citing Tencent’s chairman and chief executive officer Ma Huaten.

Tencent will grow its business by introducing independent games developers and strategically cooperating with other online business-to-consumer website operators, Ma said.

“There are many industry analysts that believe Tencent is just like Microsoft, which previously monopolized everything and hermetically sealed themselves in,” Ma said.

“We began to recognize that although a rich product line could better meet user segmentation and their professional needs, it is not easy to be completed by just 1 company since this will be restricted by the product development cycle,” he added.

“After we saw the business model of jointly launching application stores by Apple and Facebook, we found that opening up our platform [to third parties] would be a win-win solution for company’s future development, thus, Tencent made up its mind to build an open platform.”

On the subject of China’s rapidly growing e-commerce market, Ma said Tencent would make the effort to build an online shopping mall, citing as an example an online shopping platform for its hugely popular QQ instant messaging service, which integrates all the e-commerce websites in China to boost the company’s business expansion.

However, the company won’t be building an independent online shopping website, he added.