WeChat is top workplace communications app for 90 per cent of Chinese professionals
Phone calls, emails and faxes move over. WeChat, China’s top social networking app initially designed for close friends to chitchat, is quietly taking over workplaces across the country, a study has found.
Operated by the Hong Kong-listed Chinese internet giant Tencent Holdings, WeChat – more often known as Weixin – on the mainland, is already the dominant app in the country with 889 million monthly active users. It is used to send instant messages, buy movie tickets, pay utility bills, as well as for other services that make people’s personal lives more convenient.
But it doesn’t stop at people’s personal lives. With its huge user base and an increasing number of features enabling work-related tasks, WeChat continues to blur the line between personal and professional life with nearly 90 per cent of more than 20,000 surveyed web users in China seeing the app as their top choice for daily work communication.
When people have more business relationships on WeChat they will need to maintain them and spend more time there
The annual WeChat user behaviour report released on Monday by Penguin Intelligence, a Tencent research arm, found that 87.7 per cent of WeChat users use the app for daily work communication. Phones, text messages and fax machines were used by 59.5 per cent, and email by 22.6 per cent.
“There is a clear trend that WeChat is becoming ‘WeWork’ as more people see the app as the go-to app for work communication,” said Xue Yu, senior market analyst with IDC China.
Initially designed as an app for people to stay in touch with friends, about 57 per cent of the surveyed WeChat users say their new contacts on the app are work related.