WeChat continues growth, hits 650 million users

WeChat, Tencent’s popular messaging app, isn’t finished with its growth. After cracking 600 million monthly active users (MAUs) at the end of June, Tencent today announced that WeChat now has 649.5 million MAUs. That figure is for Q3 at the end of September.

Tencent’s newest earnings report hails WeChat’s 39 percent growth from Q3 2014 to the latest data, but once again did not provide a breakdown of where the users are located. That makes it hard to gauge whether it has broken out of the mainland China market with eye-catching marketing campaigns in India, across Southeast Asia, and parts of Latin America.

Tencent said that Q3 was marked by a huge push to get more people in China using WeChat for online shopping and in-store payments with the in-built WeChat Pay. As we saw last month, WeChat Pay can be used in a variety of shops in China for cashless transactions in the manner of Apple Pay. It revealed that WeChat Pay and the similar QQ Pay (QQ is Tencent’s older messaging app, which is like a hyperactive MSN) have now exceeded 200 million users who have tied a bank card to the service.

The new numbers show that WeChat is still growing strongly, rather like Facebook’s WhatsApp, which recently soared past 900 million MAUs. It’ll be a relief to Tencent that growth on the app hasn’t stalled – the nightmare scenario now faced by Line.

Tencent’s full Q3 report is here (PDF link).