This is in large part because its founder, Allen Zhang, despite enjoying rock-star status in China, rarely gives interviews. Most observers now rate WeChat as offering a superior user experience than its western counterparts today and its innovative features are now being copied by others.īut how did WeChat gain such a strong market position? While some aspects of the WeChat story are well known, there is virtually nothing written about how WeChat works from the inside. It had to fend off dozens of domestic competitors when it was launched, and it had to keep innovating to stay ahead.
Many westerners are sceptical about successful Chinese software companies, bearing in mind Facebook’s absence and Google’s exit from the market in the early 2000s.īut WeChat didn’t get an easy ride.
These all open inside WeChat, providing a seamless and integrated service for upwardly-mobile Chinese users. It isn’t just the default option for social networking and chat, it is also the leader in mobile payments taxi, restaurant, movie-booking and retail apps. The preference among Chinese consumers for an all-encompassing, holistic view plays very well with the reach of the WeChat ecosystem.With more than a billion daily active users, WeChat dominates daily life in China. This cultural difference may be a small contributing factor to WeChat’s success in China, and its lack of an equivalent in the West. Where Americans will hone in on the people contained in an image, Chinese people will typically look more at the background and the surrounding items.
There is another layer to this, potentially.Ī wide range of studies has highlighted how differently Chinese and American consumers perceive their respective environments. Its success relies on its ownership of so many aspects of daily life, and this ownership would be nigh-on impossible to wrestle from Google or Facebook at this stage. The reality is that WeChat is quite unlikely to gain a serious foothold in the US. As such, that could help to expand WeChat’s reach to Western markets. Moreover, it has been reported that foreigners based in China have become even more addicted to the app than locals. There are now over 5 million WeChat users based in South Africa alone. This applies to the Chinese government as much as it does to WeChat, and these two strands are interconnected.Īs more and more Chinese workers move to Africa to work on government-funded projects, they tend to take their love of WeChat with them. We should first explore the capabilities that the WeChat app ecosystem provides for an active user base of almost one billion people before we can summarize the experience it offers.Īfrica has been a focus area for expansion, too.
However, these comparisons do not tell the full story. It has an app store, so it has similarities with Apple and Google. It contains instant messaging, so it is like WhatsApp. This brings it into direct competition with Weibo in China. WeChat is a major player in the social space, so in that sense it is a bit like Facebook. As a result, defining exactly what the WeChat app is today turns out to be a much more difficult task than it seems. From here, Tencent has added features and opened up the app to outside developers too. The addition of Moments was a particularly important milestone, as it brought with it a news feed featuring updates from friends and contacts. Later rebranded ‘WeChat’ for an international market, the app soon started to encompass more features. In part, this instant success was down to the ability to make voice calls and leave voice messages, due to the more difficult nature of typing Chinese characters on a smartphone. This project took off quickly, with over 100 million registered users by 2012. Tencent launched an instant messaging app, Weixin, from its Guangzhou Research center in early 2011.
First, some background: The history of WeChat