3 reasons WeChat failed internationally (and most other Chinese apps do too)

Disconnect is a weekly column in which Tech in Asia’s Charlie Custer pokes at holes, plays devil’s advocate, or otherwise attempts to rain on the tech industry’s parade.

Photo credit: Pabak Sarkar

Yesterday, my colleague Steven wrote an excellent piece about Tencent’s chat app WeChat and how, despite the money Tencent poured into marketing via stars like Lionel Messi, the app simply hasn’t caught on outside of China. In virtually every market Tencent targeted, WeChat is still playing second fiddle to Facebook’s apps.

Why? There are a lot of market-specific reasons if you do a deep dive. But broadly, I think there are three big mistakes Tencent made with WeChat in its overseas expansion, and – not coincidentally – they’re mistakes that Chinese companies make a lot when they launch internationally.

1. Late to the party

The first and most obvious reason is something Steven also noted in his article: WeChat hit most international markets in 2012 or even later, well after other chat apps had gotten established there. Tencent tried to make up for that with an expensive, star-studded marketing push, but marketing doesn’t work that well for chat apps. Ultimately, if your friends use a chat app, you’re probably going to use it too. If your friends don’t use an a chat app, you’re probably not going to use it regardless of how many Messi ads you see.

By the time WeChat was launched internationally, there was already a dominant chat app in most markets. It varied from place to place. In Indonesia, it was Blackberry Messenger. In the US, it was WhatsApp. But the core problem was the same: people’s friends were already using a chat app that wasn’t WeChat.

Crowds at China’s Tiananmen Square. Photo by Ole Bendik Kvisberg.

2. China-first approach

WeChat’s second mistake was not offering people any significant reason to switch from whatever chat app they were already using.

In China, Tencent didn’t make this mistake. WeChat’s main competition in the early days was another Tencent app, QQ, but that was a holdover from the days of PC-based instant messaging. WeChat was engineered for the mobile world, and Tencent quickly turned it from a simple messaging app into an all-in-one mobile platform on which Chinese users could do everything from order a pizza to play their favorite games.

The company has clearly put China first in its WeChat development plans.

But while Tencent talked a good game about keeping things equal, those same features came to international users more slowly, if they ever came at all. Even now, in mid-2016, I still can’t order any food through my American WeChat app. I can’t book an Uber or control my smart TV with it. Four years after its international launch, the global version of WeChat is still only a pale shell of what compared to what’s available in the Chinese version.

To be fair, it’s hard to blame Tencent for this, given the size of the Chinese market, the success the app has enjoyed there, and the ease with which Tencent can link the app with some of its other businesses (like mobile gaming). To give the global app the same functionality as the domestic app would require Tencent to negotiate thousands of partnerships with businesses across the world – an exhausting and expensive proposition, to be sure.

But still, the company has clearly put China first in its WeChat development plans. Is it really any surprise that it’s seen far more success in China than in other markets, where the product it offers feels like a stripped-for-parts skeleton when compared with the Chinese original?

3. Poor localization