WeChat Data Report – Summer 2017

August 18, 2017

From communicating with friends and performing complex payments, WeChat has been at the center of the digital revolution in the Chinese market. Each year, WeChat releases detailed reports on its performance and user behaviour with their analysis. Here’s a summary of the data in these reports.

 

Number of Users and Behavior:

WeChat has recorded daily active users to be over 877 million in June 2017 with over 20 million official accounts on the database. This is an increase of 21% from last year.

The app also recorded 600 million monthly active mobile payment users. Moreover, every day 50% of users use WeChat for an average of 90+ minutes. Another interesting point is that 30% of all time spent on mobile in China is on WeChat alone.

WeChat User Data 2017 China

WeChat User Engagement

We now know how many users visit the app everyday. It’s time to take a look at what they do when they are online. The last year saw an increase of 67% total messages sent per day on WeChat with an average of 8 calls per month with over 65 mins of calls per month per user. Apart from sending messages, users are also reading content from official brand accounts. Ever month users read official account articles the length of a novel!

Users also send each other 28 red packets per user in a month with ¥580 sent each month per user.

WeChat User Engagement

WeChat in Overseas Travel

Over the last year, 135 million outbound travellers from China spent over $261 billion abroad with top destinations that included, Japan, USA, Thailand, S Korea, Australia and the United Kingdom. This has been largely possible due to businesses targeting Chinese customers as they travel abroad by simplifying payments. For businesses, 40% of Mobike rides are initiated from their WeChat mini program (other 60% being from their own app) Anoother addition is that, Moments ads targeting Chinese tourists abroad are officially opening up to all businesses from August.

As WeChat sees an increase of users everyday, it will be quite interesting to see how the platform grows beyond its current capabilities to make it an integral part of business and life in the Chinese market.

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898 millions users, 10 millions official accounts, discover the latest trends on WeChat !

April 28, 2017

Tencent Penguin Intelligence Survey released its annual WeChat users report earlier this week. Apart from noticing significant increase in the average number of WeChat contacts and the usage of WeChat for work, it has shown incredible shift in the transition to a cashless society through WeChat Pay as well.

With the average time spent being 66 mins, the increase in average number of contacts are believed to be work related. The survey also pointed out the major reasons to join group chats are for corporate and professional networking. This clearly shows us how WeChat has become the prominent communication tool for daily work.

WeChat Pay being the major contender apart from Alipay in minimizing cash transactions in the country, they have largely succeeded as well. The data projects that WeChat pay is the primary payment method for offline purchases with 93% adoption rate across tier 1 and tier 2 cities which includes Beijing and Shanghai.

With WeChat Pay believed to be more popular with small businesses for transactions. The amount spent monthly through these portals have also seen dip in light use (below 500) and a raise in mid or high usage (1000-5000) compared to the previous year. With all that being said one of the major reason pointed out by the respondents through this survey was that they use WeChat Pay as they were not carrying cash and the situations they used this mode of payment were at supermarkets, convenience stores, online shopping, food (restaurants) and at the malls.

The survey also helped in understanding the users better in terms of the need to increase familiarity with the use of ‘Mini Programs’. It was also found that 57% of the users are willing to pay for content and information on a monthly basis, which seems to be China’s new trend.

The growth of official accounts on WeChat has been quite significant in 2016. According to the survey nearly ⅓ of WeChat official accounts are doing some form of e-commerce leading to increase in the number of followers for these official accounts.

With 898 million users, 10 million official accounts and 200,000 WeChat developers, were the established key statistics of the report published.

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