![]() Most importantly, over half of WeChat users have been persuaded to link their bank cards to the app. Punters did so 11 billion times during the show, with 810m shakes a minute recorded at one point. A successful stunt during last year’s celebration of Chinese New Year’s Eve saw CCTV, the official state broadcaster, offer millions of dollars in cash rewards to WeChat users who shook their phones on cue. Waving it at a television allows the app to recognise the current programme and viewers to interact. Shaking the phone has proven a popular way to make new friends who are also users. WeChat has worked hard to make sure that its product is enjoyable to use. A typical user returns to it ten times a day or more. More than a third of all the time spent by mainlanders on the mobile internet is spent on WeChat. By now over 700m people use it, and it is one of the world’s most popular messaging apps (see chart). The service, which is known on the mainland as Weixin, began five years ago as an innovation from Tencent, a Chinese online-gaming and social-media firm. In other words, the conditions were all there for WeChat to take wing: new technologies, business models built around mobile phones, and above all, customers eager to experiment. ![]() ![]() About half of all sales over the internet in China take place via mobile phones, against roughly a third of total sales in America. Many leapt from the pre-web era straight to the mobile internet, skipping the personal computer altogether. More Chinese reach the internet via their mobiles than do so in America, Brazil and Indonesia combined. That is only fitting, for China makes and puts to good use more smartphones than any other country. It is the best example yet of how China is shaping the future of the mobile internet for consumers everywhere. Thanks to WeChat, Chinese consumers can navigate their day without once spending banknotes or pulling out plastic. People who divide their time between China and the West complain that leaving WeChat behind is akin to stepping back in time.Īmong all its services, it is perhaps its promise of a cashless economy, a recurring dream of the internet age, that impresses onlookers the most. It is this status as a hub for all internet activity, and as a platform through which users find their way to other services, that inspires Silicon Valley firms, including Facebook, to monitor WeChat closely. He can easily book and pay for taxis, dumpling deliveries, theatre tickets, hospital appointments and foreign holidays, all without ever leaving the WeChat universe.Īs one American venture capitalist puts it, WeChat is there “at every point of your daily contact with the world, from morning until night”. Yu Hui’s father uses the app to shop online, to pay for goods at physical stores, settle utility bills and split dinner tabs with friends, just with a few taps. Yu Hui’s mother also uses her smartphone camera to scan the WeChat QR (quick response) codes of people she meets far more often these days than she exchanges business cards. It has a business-oriented chat service akin to America’s Slack. The app offers everything from free video calls and instant group chats to news updates and easy sharing of large multimedia files. Like most professionals on the mainland, her mother uses WeChat rather than e-mail to conduct much of her business. The cuddly critter’s rotund belly disguises a microphone, which Yu Hui uses to send rambling updates and songs to her parents it lights up when she gets an incoming message back. Instead she uses a Mon Mon, an internet-connected device that links through the cloud to the WeChat app. She is too young to carry around a mobile phone. Over a year ago, she started communicating with her parents using WeChat, a Chinese mobile-messaging service. YU HUI, a boisterous four-year-old living in Shanghai, is what marketing people call a digital native.
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