Online shopping for products in a marketplace with over 10 million stores, free messages, calls and video calls, file sharing (even large multimedia files), social networking for both personal and professional purposes, online bill payments and money transfers, booking appointments with the doctor (and anywhere else). Many of you reading this note are very likely doing some of the above (or all of them!) using your computer or mobile phone. How many apps do you need to download, how many accounts do you have to create, and how many passwords do you need to remember? And if there was only one app that required just one account and offered all these and a few more (one app to rule them all)? Wouldn’t that be something “revolutionary”?
If you happen to live in China, you’re “lucky.” For the Chinese, this app has been part of their daily lives for years. It’s called Weixin, it’s hugely successful (counting hundreds of millions of users) and its value is estimated at around 80 billion dollars. The Weixin phenomenon has impressed some Westerners so much that The Economist devoted an article to it last summer, followed by a similar piece in the print edition of Der Spiegel last November (and who knows how many others we’re unaware of). Built by the Chinese company Tencent, the Weixin app started out as a copy of ICQ (an old Israeli-inspired instant-messaging application) and evolved into something the respective Silicon Valley companies can only dream of, each of them fighting to grab the lion’s share in just one of the sectors mentioned above (and of course keeping a very close eye on Weixin).
The fact that China, once a warehouse of cheap labor, is beginning to emerge as a serious competitor even in capital-intensive sectors, is something the West is slowly starting to digest (even if it’s hard to swallow). But that it could be so far ahead in something so high-tech that only Silicon Valley had the “right” to create and only liberal Westerners could accept—well, that’s just too much! Western analysts are racking their brains trying to figure out how the Chinese pulled this off. Could it be because many Chinese skipped straight from the pre-internet era straight to the smartphone age? Or maybe because the Chinese government applies protectionist policies even on the internet? Or perhaps, we dare say, they’ll eventually start whispering that the internet becomes more efficient when it’s not so anarchic and there’s a degree of centralized, planned management? Times are changing! (Messi, by the way, was well paid to advertise WeChat…)