GUEST POST-WeChat Story Part 1: In-House Roots
Note: Today marks the start of a series of guest posts on the rise of WeChat, China’s wildly popular mobile messaging giant that now boasts more than 600 million users. The series by freelance writer Lanie Nie will run on alternating days over the next 2 weeks.
By Lanie Nie
If you recently traveled by bus or subway in a big Chinese city, you probably noticed one thing immediately — nearly everyone was fixated on the small screens of their smartphone handsets, no matter how crowded the place or how long the journey. At the center of that obsession is the mobile messaging app called WeChat or Weixin in Chinese, which is owned by Chinese Internet giant Tencent (HKEx: 700) and is similar to services like WhatsApp, Kakao Talk and Line.
WeChat might share the same starting point with these popular services, but it has already been telling another story in its home market. With a claimed domestic user-base of more than 600 million, the native mobile app for average Chinese smartphone owners has become a village square of friend updates and subscription feeds, an online storefront for money market fund products as well as a portal into a taxi ride, a group-buying deal and a movie ticket reservation. It’s also an urban guide and offers business review services and a catalog of top smartphone games, which makes it fair to say the world is your WeChat.
Reportedly taking up as much as 80 percent of the time some people spend on mobile, WeChat not only casts a spell on young Chinese just like Snapchat sweeps campuses in the United States, but is surprisingly attractive to more sophisticated users as well. Liu Chuanzhi, founder of China’s largest PC maker Lenovo (HKEx: 992), admitted during a recent interview with China Entrepreneur magazine that he “uses WeChat every single day and is always busy checking new updates”.
Rome was not built in one day, and neither was WeChat’s success. For those who are interested in or have been frustrated by the Chinese market, it may help to see some local perspectives on the 3-year-old WeChat. The service started as a mobile messaging app but has now become a piece of infrastructure in a mobile-mediated network society that is gradually taking shape in the world’s largest Internet market.
An IM For Smartphones
Officially launched on January 21, 2011, WeChat racked up its first 100 million users in just 433 days, or less than one and a half years after the idea was born. Such smartphone apps can indeed go viral, and this is exactly what caught the attention of Allen Zhang, head of Tencent’s Guangzhou R&D team under the Corporate Development Business Group, who later became better known as the “Father of WeChat”.
Local media reports noted it was Kik Messenger’s instant success that caught Zhang’s attention and prompted him to write an e-mail to Pony Ma, founder and CEO of Tencent. In his message he said there would be a new instant messenger (IM) for smartphones, which could pose a great threat to the dominance of Tencent’s own QQ service. Zhang volunteered to cover the issue, and Ma quickly embraced the offer.
Before his career in Tencent, Zhang made his name in domestic IT circles for building the highly acclaimed Foxmail. His background and reputation helped him land the role as head of the Guangzhou R&D team after Tencent acquired the email client in March 2005, as Ma aimed to build an email brand for his company. Three years later, QQ Mail had become the most used mailbox product in China for its simple and clean user experience.
Messaging Just For Mobile
Zhang, a public admirer of the late Steve Jobs and also a rock ‘n’ roll fan, adapted his genius in building I/O modules and his understanding of human nature into the creation of WeChat. Designed specifically for mobile phones, WeChat also has a leg up over app services that were originally developed for desktop computers, such as the mobile version of Tencent’s own QQ social networking tool that’s popular among Chinese PC users.
Equally important, as an in-house startup of Tencent WeChat enjoyed access to QQ’s vast contact lists containing more than 800 million monthly active users. On January 16, 2013, six days before the celebration of its second birthday, WeChat proudly announced that its user base passed 300 million.
But rumors of internal conflicts and clashes with established business partners like China’s three leading telecom operators were swirling, as the phenomenal growth of this new start-up project began hurting the older incumbent businesses. Under these circumstances, Tencent made a bold but smart move to bet bigger on mobile by letting the whole company get involved, as revealed in an internal e-mail on January 28, 2013. That marked a turnaround from the previous strategy of assigning a single group to take over all mobile-related businesses, which was put in place via a restructuring just half a year earlier.
Unlike many people who often mention Tencent’s great help to WeChat, especially during its infant period, Pony Ma often talks about how difficult his company’s position could be if it didn’t build WeChat. And it’s true. The eye-opening news of Facebook’s (Nasdaq: FB) $19 billion acquisition deal of WhatsApp has now established a price floor for what it costs not to have a strong mobile presence in the current digital environment.
Lanie Nie is a writer, translator and participant observer of localization and internationalization efforts by Chinese technology, media and entertainment companies. She freelances regularly for Chinese business and technology news websites and can be emailed directly at lanienie@hotmail.com.
