Chinese authorities are reportedly considering roping WeChat Pay into the spin-off, which may further complicate regulatory matters for Tencent.

Musk says he’d consider turning Twitter into a super app with a strong payments focus and pointed to WeChat as a “good model.”

Tencent’s WeChat lowered its SMB fees in response to a government directive, and CBDC adoption may complicate business further.

AirAsia, one of the world’s largest budget airlines, is on a mission to build a regional super app. While it follows in the footsteps of titans like WeChat in China and Gojek in Southeast Asia, AirAsia could blaze a path for travel and other industries not endemic to the mobile space. Companies looking to expand their mobile business should take lessons from its journey, wherever its final destination may be.

AirAsia, one of the world’s largest budget airlines, is on a mission to build a regional super app. While it follows in the footsteps of titans like WeChat in China and Gojek in Southeast Asia, if AirAsia succeeds, it will blaze a path for travel and other industries not endemic to the mobile space.

Of this massive cohort of social networkers, 811.0 million will be WeChat users this year. There is nowhere else in the world where one app has so many users in one market. When a previously offline consumer in China acquires their first ever smartphone, often their very first action is to open a WeChat account (and WeChat was probably preloaded on the phone).

(If WeChat were included, TikTok would be the fourth-largest; WeChat will have 811.0 million monthly users in China this year.). Snapchat and Twitter will trail by a wide margin. The rise of TikTok is especially challenging for Snapchat, where it competes head-to-head for the youth audience.

Tencent-owned WeChat Pay is housed within China’s top chat app, WeChat, which is used by over 90% of mobile phone messaging app users in the market. This enables users to access P2P payments and complete simple transactions in the context of conversations.

Gaming and tech conglomerate Tencent, which also owns messaging app WeChat, has pointed to the metaverse as an opportunity to expand its gaming business, per TechCrunch. TikTok owner Bytedance has followed in Meta and Microsoft’s footsteps and acquired VR headset company Pico, and Alibaba has plans to release AR glasses.

Nearly every messaging app user in China uses WeChat, and its user base continues to grow. WeChat, of course, is much more than a messaging service: It’s a catchall where users can perform social, commerce, and many other digital activities. In Japan, LINE has become synonymous with mobile messaging.

China also has the unique social networking digital platform called WeChat (owned by Tencent). WeChat is a category-defying sociocultural phenomenon, and its multipurpose ubiquity skews China’s social commerce figures upward because any shopping-related activity that starts out on WeChat will count as social. In China, using WeChat is nearly akin to simply using the internet.

According to our latest forecast, 87.8% of smartphone users in China, or 743.5 million people, will use WeChat at least once per month in 2021. Commerce on WeChat is powered by its embedded applets, Mini Programs.

We define “social commerce” as products or services ordered via social networks, such as Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, TikTok, WeChat, Line, VK, and others, either by buying directly on the social platform, such as via Instagram Checkout or WeChat Mini Programs, or through clicking links on the social network that lead to the retailer’s product page to complete the purchase.

In an inspection that ended in late 2021, regulators discovered that, in some cases, WeChat Pay failed to enforce KYC and know your business rules, which are customer and merchant identity verification checks meant to prevent financial crimes. WeChat Pay was reportedly also found to have allowed transactions related to gambling and other illicit activities.

Alibaba will gain more than WeChat from the opening of the companies’ respective walled gardens. Alibaba will develop new mini programs within WeChat and will benefit from the new ability to place outbound links within WeChat. As a result, it will eventually see significant gains in social commerce. Alibaba’s long-term prospects will be constrained by China’s slowing consumer spending growth.

This drove massive adoption of payments service Alipay and messaging platform WeChat, which also facilitates payments. Strict app marketplace regulations: The Google Play Store isn’t available in China, Apple is limited in what it can include on its App Store, and even Huawei’s AppGallery lacks many major apps.

The full regulation is available in Chinese via official WeChat post or in English as translated by Standard University.

In 2019, 94.5% of internet users in China will be social network users. That amounts to just 59.0% of the country’s population. This report covers the trends shaping the market, as well as our first-ever user forecast for the popular short-video platform Douyin and updated estimates for WeChat and Sina Weibo.

In social media, it has been Douyin and Kuaishou that have stolen user attention from Tencent’s WeChat. Ad revenues had been one of the last categories where the BATs held on to their dominance, but that’s over now, too. ByteDance surged past Tencent and Baidu in 2020, and now its ad business is nearly double those of the previous incumbents.

It became the first app to unseat WeChat from the top spot in the social category since 2019. Jelly allows users to share moments in their daily lives using images generated from their customizable avatar, design outfits, and interact with each other. Note: The app has been removed from app stores to reconcile some technical issues. Chinese regulators are active in the metaverse buildout process.

As WeChat enters its second decade, Allen Zhang Xiaolong, chief architect of the super app, pledged at an annual conference to make videos its cornerstone in the coming years. More specifically, Zhang spotlighted Channels, its short-form video feature, and a more seamless user experience with official accounts and miniprograms (lightweight apps within WeChat that require minimal downloading and disappear after use).