With 450 million active users each month and 1 million new sign-ups per day, WhatsApp is indeed the world’s most popular messaging app.
However, figures revealed today show that WeChat is catching up. WeChat’s parent company, Tencent, released its earnings report today revealing that the combined monthly active users of WeChat and Weixin (the version available in China) reached 355 million as of end 2013, an increase of 121 percent year-on-year and up six percent quarter-on-quarter.
No doubt WeChat dominates in China, and as Tencent didn’t release a breakdown of the monthly active users according to region, there’s no certainty how it performed in markets beyond its home ground. However, WeChat has been intensifying its efforts to attract overseas users.
WeChat rolled out its games across the world in January this year, after it introduced games and added support for payments toWeixin in August last year. “We will also leverage Official Accounts and Weixin Payment to explore O2O (online-to-offline) and mobile e-commerce opportunities in China,” a Tencent statement says.
This year, Tencent also plans to ramp up its online video service — which could see videos and related content being introduced into WeChat. It also intends to focus on marketing WeChat in certain international markets, and encourage the uptake of its payment solutions in China, which includes rolling out subsidies to consumers and merchants.
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