Bottom line: WeChat will face slow progress in the US and other global markets due to strong competition, and will be hobbled by concerns that it may monitor its users activities like it does in China.
WeChat in US promotion on UCLA campus
Tencent’s (HKEx: 700) WeChat mobile messaging service may be wildly popular in China, but it’s facing a steep uphill climb outside its protected home market. My own recent experience using the service in Hong Kong this week highlights one of WeChat’s biggest problems, namely concerns among users that their activities may be monitored and censored. That kind of issue could push users to more popular western brands like WhatsApp and Line, which have cleaner reputations. Tencent itself isn’t helping the situation by using a half-hearted promotion strategy in the US, as highlighted in a new report on some of its recent activities to crack that highly competitive market. Read Full Post…
I haven’t written about Facebook (Nasdaq: FB) in a while, mostly because the company hasn’t made any concrete moves into China lately despite previous assertions that it would like to enter the market. But the company’s newly announced plan to purchase the popular WhatsApp mobile messaging service for up to $19 billion looks like a good opportunity to revisit the topic, and what this deal might mean for Facebook in China. Facebook’s own site has been blocked in China since 2009, making it inaccessible to the vast majority of more than 600 million Chinese web surfers. But WhatsApp is widely available, even though it competes with the wildly popular rival WeChat service from local Internet giant Tencent. (HKEx: 700)
The headlines are buzzing about a new joint venture between wireless carrier China Telecom (HKEx: 728) and Internet company NetEase (Nasdaq: NTES), in one of the bigger media frenzies I’ve seen in quite a while for this kind of tie-up. But everyone loves a good contest, and this particular joint venture offers just that with a major new challenge to Tencent’s (HKEx: 700) hugely popular WeChat mobile instant messaging service, known in Chinese as Weixin. Just to make sure everyone understands what this story is about, China Telecom and NetEase have even given their new service the name of YiChat or Yixin in Chinese, which both sound quite similar to the English and Chinese names Tencent’s service. Read Full Post…
