WeChat Competitor Feixin: 100 Million Users, But Low Activity Levels

Over the past year, Tencent’s WeChat has exploded. So much so, in fact, that you might forget that other mobile messaging services were actually on the scene first. One of them, China’s Mobile’s (NYSE:CHL) Feixin (its official English name is Fetion but I’m not going to call it that because that’s a terrible name), has been around since 2011, but a recent report in the 21st Century Business Herald shows that sadly, the company doesn’t have much to show for that.

Following the theory about college students demonstrated by Facebook’s rapid expansion in the US, China Mobile has been pushing Feixin hard on college campuses, with the theory being that if students adopt it, sooner or later, other users follow. And the push hasn’t been for naught; the 21st Century Business Herald cites data claiming the service has nearly 100 million monthly active users, many of them college students.

Unfortunately, the paper also says that its own investigation has shown that the students who do have the app installed still don’t use it very often. Chief complaints among students are that the service doesn’t have enough other people on it, that the user experience isn’t smooth enough, and that it charges money to respond to text messages. Tencent’s WeChat, on the other hand, is free, has double Feixin’s active user count, and offers a pretty slick user experience.

So if Feixin is the inferior product, why do students even have it installed? Apparently, at many campuses it’s one of the primary modes of communication between students and instructors in the event that a whole class needs to be notified of something at the last minute. For example, in a 21st Century Business Herald investigation at Renmin University among grad students, the paper found that nearly all the grad students it spoke to saw Feixin as a kind of notification center rather than a tool for chatting with friends.

Although that’s not China Mobile’s goal, it might not be bad as a consolation prize. Given that the company has had longer than Tencent to create and promote a compelling chat product and still hasn’t been able to capture that market, I doubt the company has much hope of overtaking WeChat now that it’s extremely widespread and popular. But as long as people are using the service for some reason — even if it’s just to get notifications from work or school — then that’s a start, and something China Mobile can work to build on in the future.

(21st Century Business Herald via Sina Tech)