Tencent’s WeChat app creates millions of new jobs in China’s digital economy, report says

China’s biggest messaging app WeChat helped create 29 million job opportunities last year and has since helped stabilise the country’s employment situation in the time of the coronavirus pandemic, a report released Thursday showed.

In 2019, WeChat helped create 29 million jobs, including 26 million directly related to its ecosystem, the latter of which represented a 16 per cent increase from the year before.

Companies using WeChat’s platform and tools to work, hire, and communicate generated 3.62 million job opportunities, while WeChat’s in-app mini-program ecosystem created 5.36 million job opportunities last year, according to the report which was co-published by WeChat’s owner Tencent and the state-run China Academy for Information and Communications Technology.

“The popularisation of the app’s digital tools including its official accounts, mini-program, and payment services have greatly reduced the employment threshold and broken the space, time, and age restrictions of employment, enabling medium and small entrepreneurs to get started quickly and join the wave of the digital economy,” the report said.

Along with WeChat, China’s social media platforms such as microblogging site Weibo and Bytedance’s short video app Douyin are now widely used by businesses and brands to promote their services and reach more customers. As more Chinese businesses use social media platforms for advertising, new occupations are also generated.

In February, the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security and the State Administration of Market Supervision jointly released 16 new occupations, including “all-media operator”, referring to people whose full-time job is to run businesses based on media, including internet-based platforms.