It’s actually a bit fuzzy where Tencent makes money on WeChat Pay. One way to think about WeChat mini-programs and their apps is that they’re storefronts built on top of a payment app, rather than a payment experience build into a website. In Q4 2019, WeChat pay was doing more than 1 billion commercial transactions/day across its 800 million monthly active users and 50 million merchants.
#WECHAT CHINA WECHAT PAY 800M UPDATE#
In that same update (WeChat Version 5.0) WeChat added payments and the ability to buy stickers (one of their first monetization attempts). In my last post, I proposed that WeChat began morphing into a true “Super App” at the point where it added official accounts (a pre-cursor for mini-programs) in May of 2013. This is part of a larger thesis on Super Apps that I’ll talk about in my next post. To be a truly generalizable Super App, I believe you need to own your user’s wallet. Did the fact that China ‘skipped’ the era of plastic cards allow WeChat Pay and Alipay to flourish or did China skip plastic cards because of WeChat Pay and Alipay? Expanding Finance: In my view, another chicken and egg situation. In terms of WeChat Pay via QR codes, China also notably skipped the era of plastic cards.Ĭhina, meanwhile, was almost entirely cash-based one decade ago that was the context for the rise of mobile payments, which represented their own gargantuan leap forward. There’s some positive reinforcing loop here.īesides riding the smartphone wave, WeChat, along with their duopoly competitor, Alipay, crested and then rode the payments wave.ĬB Insights points out that, “These growing use cases for mobile payments in the everyday lives of Chinese consumers catapulted China’s mobile payment volume from $1T in 2015 to $15.5T in 2017, with WeChat Pay and Alipay making up a whopping 92% of China’s total mobile payment volume as of Q3’17.” It seems to me that WeChat rode the wave of mobile phones and mobile internet in China, but I’d also be willing to wager that part of the reason that mobile internet (compared to desktop internet) is so popular in China is because of the sophistication and breadth of mobile apps, WeChat being the most relevant. There is a bit of a chicken and egg question in my mind. According to Statista, “In March 2020, around 99.3 percent of internet users in China used mobile phones to go online.” That number increased to 90 million in 2011 when WeChat was officially launched and had rocketed to 214 million by 2012.Īs of late 2019, China had 851 million smartphone users, accounting for 26% of the world’s smartphone users. In 2010, when WeChat was still a research project, there were only 36 million smartphone sales in China. WeChat users grew in tandem with smartphone growth in China.
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