WeChat is an instant messaging service provided by the Chinese company Tencent. It has been so successful the past year that it took the place of the once-king Weibo microblogging interface, run by the competitor Sina. The success of WeChat has been extremly quick, taking advantage of celebrities accounts, and above all by being a great platform for other apps.
Is the WeChat/Weixin rule undisputed ? That’s not sure, a lot might be going is going to happen in 2014, the Chinese Internet is so quickly evolving that places are hard to get and being n°1 is certainly not a life warranty on such a market.
The first competition should come from Alibaba, one of the e-commerce giants in China. The application launched by Alibaba is called Laiwang. The competition should be targeted on telecom services, chat application Laiwang, vendors on online patforms and at last should take advantage of the many celebrities on its Weibo to develop the audience.
This is a fight between Alibaba and Wechat/WeiXin, since one of the last and most successful apps of WeChat is mobile shopping with consumer profiling, an incentive to develop its Yixun shopping site. Within 10 days of the launching of this new application, more than 200,000 orders on YiXun through WeChat were counted. This shows an online war might have begun betwenn Alibaba and Tencent.
Tencent and its WeChat have experience of gaining online markets with multiple applications, they have done it with their QQ chat service and its gaming platform. Tencent’s rivals have to react to such an agressive commercial behaviour.
Alibaba has entered within an agreement with Weibo and has launched its Laiwang, with first great success being the attraction of celebrities to a new platform, including real estate mogul Pan Shiyi. The Laiwang appication features apps and links with Taobao, the e-commerce giant run by Alibaba, which is a strong incentive to use the service.
Other competitors are to be watched : Momo, Line and Miliao. While relaticely small compared with WeChat, they are all profitable and might profit from niche marketing. And the Chinese consumer base can be versatile, who knows what will be cool next year ?
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