New WeChat Payment app to spur competition in China’s mobile payment market

September 1, 2013 Leave a comment

New WeChat app to spur competition in mobile payment market

Staff Reporter

2013-09-01

The debut of the new version of edition 5.0 WeChat, a mobile messaging communication service developed by Chinese internet company Tencent, has sparked concerns among major e-commerce companies that the mobile payment segment will now be dominated by Tencent, the Guangzhou-based Southern Metropolis Daily reported. Last week, Tencent’s online service, Yixun, announced that its website will now support WeChat Payment, a new feature included in the latest version of WeChat. This has made it the first business to consumer website to be fully connected with the WeChat Payment interface.This week, a letter circulating at Yixun’s rival Jingdong Mall, formerly known as 360Buy, asked its employees to begin using mobile messaging app Yixin for conducting business. Yixin was launched under a joint venture formed between China Telecom, the nation’s biggest fixed line network operator and third-largest mobile service provider, and the company NetEase.

The letter stated that Jingdong Mall has 30,000 employees, 40,000 cooperative partners and up to 100 million users. Since the company was handling millions of orders a day and processing sizeable amount of information of great importance to the company and its users, suppliers and buyers, the company’s employees should protect the information of users by using the new system.

The letter also signaled that the war between Yixin and WeChat was being reignited, the newspaper pointed out, adding that it also showed that Jingdong Mall CEO Liu Qiangdong was teaming up with NetEase’s CEO William Din to take on Ma Huateng, the founder and chairman of Tencent.

Earlier this month, Jack Ma, founder of the e-commerce giant Alibaba, announced that the company will block marketing messages sent from the WeChat platform. It was Alibaba’s latest counter-offensive against Tencent, which a week ago began banning public accounts that were primarily registered by Alibaba vendors because they were disseminating commercial advertisements via WeChat.

Most social networking sites had become critical focal points for brands to interact with users, an industry expert noted, adding that for instance, about 28% of active users searched for product information via Sina Weibo, and 43% of them tended to share their preferred brands online. This fast-growing landscape should not be ignored.

The battle had intensified as Jingdong extended support for Yixin, while Yixun had formed an alliance with WeChat. The launch of the edition 5.0 WeChat has also added a variable to the e-commerce market, given that WeChat has more than 300 million users.

Filed under TMT Trends

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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