Tencent: WeChat Has Gone Global, Now a Growing Ratio of Worldwide Users

China’s Tencent (HKG:0700) calls WeChat its “most important app,” the likes of which they’ve “never seen before in 10 years” at China’s biggest web company – nor ever before from a Chinese web product. And that’s coming from the nation’s social media and gaming giant, which boasts well over half a billion users on its IM-oriented QQ and QZone service. Expressing all this enthusiasm is Justin Sun, director of international WeChat operations at Tencent.

WeChat might have fewer users – just over 200 million – than Tencent has with QQ, but the Whatsapp-esque group messaging app has, Justin says, “great potential to be popular internationally.” And that’s a new thing. It’s started already, he reckons, and reveals that non-Chinese users of the app are increasing globally – to the point that Chinese users of WeChat “several months ago were the majority,” but not so much now.

[UPDATED: To make the context clear, WeChat’s users are still mostly Chinese, but recently that ratio is balancing out much more as global users adopt it. I’ve adjusted my title, too, which wasn’t clear enough].

The actual user break-down is a closely guarded secret at this point, but Justin – from his office in the firm’s Shenzhen HQ – conceded that the “focus is Asia” for now. He adds:

The big [WeChat] markets are Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam. […] We’re really growing in the US and Arabic regions.

As a measure of its success outside of China, it might be useful to look at the number of likes on the official Facebook pages of WeChat and its rivals: Whatsapp has 2.1 million likes, Kakaotalk a mere 45,000, and WeChat fares a bit better with 122,000 likes so far.

Even without concrete numbers for WeChat’s global reach, it’s still a marvel to see a Chinese web product (the app is known as “Weixin” in Chinese) make an impact overseas – especially a social one. We’ve seen it before with apps like UC Browser or Camera360, but a broader service has not before made the leap before.

In terms of languages, Justin says, the Asia focus “doesn’t mean we’re not serving others – we do Arabic, for example, and we’re looking at Turkish and more now.” But expansion takes more than a bunch of translated words.

Expansion partners

Though Tencent doesn’t yet have an overseas office for WeChat, Tencent is taking it on a country-by-country basis with local partnerships on the ground, which provide “operational help” and support with some promotional activities – perhaps as with the professional models promoting the app recently in Kuala Lumpur (pictured above). “We’re going to keep doing things ourselves first and keep those tight business partnerships with others.” But there seems to be no set plan for some formal overseas offices for the app’s operations.

But the company isn’t seeing pushing worldwide as a new thing for them. Justin points out: “WeChat positions itself to be international. And Tencent is international, with lots of investors from outside China.” Plus, the company has game development studios in California – though they’re not part of the WeChat team.

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