As messaging apps became more and more popular, the war is not just occupied by Western-made apps like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and others. China's WeChat is also having a prominent presence, and here it has just passed one billion monthly active users for the first time.
Tencent CEO Pony Ma revealed the number in an interview.
The one billion mark comes not long after Tencent’s third-quarter results in November that revealed WeChat’s monthly active user passing 980 million, a huge 15.8 percent increase compared to the same period on the previous year.
With 1 billion users, WeChat is joining the elite club alongside Google. Gmail, Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp, YouTube, Instagram and a few more.
The huge increase happened mostly during 2018's Spring Festival, when WeChat rolled out a series of promotions - including Spring Festival Shake (新春摇摇乐), which users can participate in lucky draws to win prizes, and digital blessing eggs (祝福彩蛋), which allows users to send new year wishes to others.
Not only did its monthly active users peaked during this time period, it's also estimated that around 688 million people used WeChat’s hongbao feature on Chinese New Year’s Eve (a 15 percent increase from the same time last year).
First released in 2011, WeChat started out as Tencent’s mobile messaging app. Since them, series of success drove WeChat to become an ecosystem of its own.
And also because WeChat has turned itself to become a social media, the milestone means that it has become the largest social network on the planet not owned by Mark Zuckerberg.
However, WeChat may experience difficulties to expand further internationally. Although chat apps in general are rapidly expanding, many countries and regions already have one app or another that dominates. And here, Facebook is still owning most of the market with both Messenger and WhatsApp, especially for Android users, with a few exceptions including China, Japan, and South Korea.
