![]() Despite filing for a US IPO to raise an estimated $500 million, Sina Weibo trails with 190 million MAUs and the challenge of not being a ‘native mobile’ platform. Other than regulatory pressures surrounding content and payment, WeChat faces few near-term competitive threats at home. Other features will be unrolled in conjunction with the FIFA World Cup soccer tournament in Brazil this summer. To an audience of advertisers gathered at Stream Asia, WeChat executives showcased partnerships with luxury brands such as Burberry’s Prorsum and new uses of the app such as the voice recognition activation of sponsored content during airings of the hit television show ‘Voice of China’ using the app’s ‘shake’ function. Using the app to pay for taxis or to ‘go Dutch’ in restaurants is another, although both Tencent and its rival Alibaba face increasing scrutiny from banking regulators over their use of virtual wallets and payment apps. The company’s recent blowout success with ‘red envelope’ donations during Chinese New Year is one illustration, with over 5 million users participating together sending out over 20 million envelopes containing virtual cash. For WeChat games are the preferred method to make money.ĬLSA recently put a price tag on WeChat of $64 billion, citing the company’s far greater earnings potential than WhatsApp. Tencent generates half of its $2.8 billion Q4 2013 revenues from games. WeChat is a unit of Tencent, whose market capitalization of over $135 billion places it in the top tier of global Internet firms. The vast majority of these users are in China itself. The app signed up a whopping 83 million new MAUs in Q4 2013 alone. Launched in January 2011, by the end of 2013 WeChat had racked up 355 million monthly active users (MAUs). In China: WeChat, One App To Rule Them All? But in Asia will this limit opportunities for the app and its new owner Facebook?Īsia today is a patchwork of mobile, social networking apps, with WeChat, Line and Kakao Talk being the most prominent. As an app focused mostly on calls and messaging, WhatsApp appears monochrome in comparison to the rich media experience of Asia-based peers. WhatsApp has done this by design, as Jan Koum still prizes the note he received from co-founder Brian Acton that exhorts: “No Ads! No Games! No Gimmicks!”.
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