Investors seemed to have lost curiosity in WeChat's growth overseas relative to heightened levels in 2013 and 2014. Much of this waning in interest relates to more conservative corporate messaging around overseas expansion throughout last year. Interesting work by leading consultancy WalkTheChat, however, lends some interesting color to the platform's position in many markets outside of China, particularly the South East Asian markets.
Tencent has in fact adopted a robust partnership strategy in some of these geographies. The company has for instance teamed up with PT Global Mediacom, Indonesia's largest media company, to jointly promote WeChat.
WalkTheChat uses Google volumes as an estimate of interest in WeChat over time via Google Adwords Tools and Google Trends, tracking app downloads and search volumes around related keywords). For those counties with a sizeable Chinese-speaking population such as Malaysia, Singapore, Hongkong, and Taiwan, the research data from July 2012 to May 2015 indicate that WeChat has seen stable growth.
The platform's share of usage in Malaysia, Singapore, Hongkong, and Taiwan is 22%, 13%, 10% and 5%, respectively. In other Asian countries such as Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines and India, WeChat's search volumerosemarkedly during Tencent's initial marketing promotions. Volumes,however, experienced asharp decline once promotions ended, nearly falling back to zero. Normalized search volumes observed in Malaysia are 40 times higher than they are in India. Research suggested that the weak performance of WeChat in certain counties may not have to do with its aging. WhatsApp's search volumes for instance saw steady improvements, having grown nine times from around 1mn to around 9mn over 2 years from May 2013 to Mar. 2015 in 9 countries polled, whilst WeChat faced declining volumes with search volumes falling from around 1mn to around 0.5mn.
WhatsAPP, Line and KaKao Talk with their first move advantage and renowned international brand are all strong competitors for WeChat in many of these overseas markets.
