{"id":293012,"date":"2019-01-11T07:35:02","date_gmt":"2019-01-11T05:35:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/?p=293012"},"modified":"2019-01-11T07:35:02","modified_gmt":"2019-01-11T05:35:02","slug":"in-tencents-future-it-wont-be-the-humans-who-chat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/mobile\/293012\/in-tencents-future-it-wont-be-the-humans-who-chat\/","title":{"rendered":"In Tencent\u2019s future, it won\u2019t be the humans who chat"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Apple Inc\u2019s biggest competitor in China isn\u2019t Xiaomi Corp or Huawei Technologies Co. It\u2019s Tencent Holdings Ltd.<\/p>\n

Industry observers have known for a while that Tencent\u2019s WeChat, including its Mini Programs platform, has the potential to displace the App Store. And its OS-agnostic nature means that users can easily swap from device to device, even across operating systems.<\/p>\n

Now the company\u00a0seems set on building out the long tail,\u00a0maximizing\u00a0value beyond mainstream usage of its core products.<\/p>\n

At its annual WeChat conference this week, Tencent executives took the stage to outline their business and development plans. On the agenda was its strategy for building out Mini Programs – a service that allows third-party developers to run scaled-down apps on top of WeChat\u2019s instant messenger.<\/p>\n

Niche apps within WeChat, such as those used by a\u00a0parent-teacher group\u00a0or neighborhood grocery store, accounted more than half of total Mini Programs traffic, Daiwa Capital Markets analysts John Choi, Candis Chan and Robin Leung wrote in a note after attending the event in Guangzhou.<\/p>\n

Being able to find these apps is a key issue, so Tencent is working on ways to improve this, the analysts wrote.\u00a0The company is also creating\u00a0developer and management tools to make it easier to build these apps, and will ramp up monetization of Mini Programs.<\/p>\n

\u201cJust build a good Mini Program, and we\u2019ll do the rest,\u201d Tencent executives told the conference, according to the Daiwa analysts.<\/p>\n

With WeChat itself nearing peak penetration (it has 1.1 billion monthly active users) Tencent needs to go deeper to keep growing. It\u2019s already nailed the big-ticket items – chat, pay, and online-to-offline services – so now it must hunt for niches.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s this \u201cthere\u2019s an app for that\u201d approach that turned Apple\u2019s iOS and Alphabet Inc.\u2019s Android into ubiquitous destinations for all manner of weird and wonderful tools – blowing out a candle with your iPhone, or saying \u201cYo\u201d to a friend.<\/p>\n

What makes Tencent\u2019s Mini Programs even more powerful is the fact that everybody in China uses WeChat (meaning there\u2019s no iOS versus\u00a0Android cleavage), and it seamlessly integrates with the core functions of the Tencent messenger (chat, pay, services).<\/p>\n

The key to leveraging this long tail will be Tencent\u2019s recent shift toward industrial and enterprise use.<\/p>\n

Matthew Brennan, a WeChat expert and founder of Chinese marketing consultancy China Channel, summarized Tencent\u2019s strength in a quote from Snap Inc. founder Evan Spiegel (Tencent owns 15% of Snap):<\/p>\n

Tencent very early on understood the power of communication because it drives frequency. And if you can be the service that\u2019s most frequently used on someone\u2019s phone, you\u2019re able to develop a lot of other ancillary businesses around that engagement.<\/p>\n

Whereas online, and later mobile, communication was once about humans chatting with humans, the next wave will be around enterprises communicating with humans, or with each other. I can imagine WeChat being used to manage inventory and order supplies,\u00a0assess weather and automatically\u00a0deploy taxis or stock up on umbrellas, or serve up ads for hot chocolate versus\u00a0ice cream.<\/p>\n

Not only would this build more stickiness – organisations are less capricious than consumers when it comes product selection – but it would allow\u00a0for collection and analysis of much more data.<\/p>\n

As Tencent transforms over the next decade, filling niches and connecting enterprises, we may find that humans are no longer the most important users.<\/p>\n

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Read: Naspers posts big jump in revenue driven by e-commerce and its stake in Tencent<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Apple Inc\u2019s biggest competitor in China isn\u2019t Xiaomi Corp or Huawei Technologies Co. It\u2019s Tencent Holdings Ltd.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":59,"featured_media":217467,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[26,1977,6188],"class_list":["post-293012","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-mobile","tag-headline","tag-tencent","tag-wechat"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293012","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/59"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=293012"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293012\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":293016,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293012\/revisions\/293016"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/217467"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=293012"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=293012"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=293012"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}