Chinese students helping WeChat use in US grow
NEW YORK — WeChat, one of China’s most popular mobile-messaging apps, is turning to thousands of students studying in the United States to spread its usage across the country.
NEW YORK — WeChat, one of China’s most popular mobile-messaging apps, is turning to thousands of students studying in the United States to spread its usage across the country.
One of them is Ms Xiaoxing Han, who graduated last year from Michigan State University. Ms Han, 25, introduced her off-campus church to WeChat, which is owned by Internet giant Tencent Holdings. Now, about 15 fellow members are using WeChat to alert the 4,000-strong Chinese community about church events.
“WeChat has everything,” said Mr Nick Setterington, director of International Ministries for University Reformed Church in Michigan. “Maintaining personal communication with the global community via WeChat has helped me stay in touch with people.”
Ms Han is one of about 274,000 Chinese nationals who studied in the US in the past academic year, many of whom have become informal ambassadors of WeChat by introducing it to non-Chinese friends and helping to lay the groundwork for Tencent to expand there. WeChat has grown to 468 million monthly users worldwide since its 2011 launch, said the firm. About three million are in the US, said GlobalWeb-Index, a London-based research firm.
The free app combines social and communication elements and can be used in Chinese or English, with Chinese messages translated into English with the click of a button.
WeChat needs all the help it can get in the US, where competition is fierce as consumers gravitate to better-known messaging apps such as WhatsApp, which had half a billion users worldwide as of April.
Tencent’s chief strategy officer James Mitchell said earlier this month that the firm had experienced setbacks in Western markets with WeChat and had found “it was proving hard to make headway”, given the expansion costs. The company has opened an office in Palo Alto and spokesman Alexander Verge said it had formed a project team to study the market.
WeChat is relying not only on ambassadors to push deeper into America, but has also been working to foster student usage there, organising a programme at the University of California, Los Angeles last November to spur downloads of the app. BLOOMBERG