Tuesday 24 November 2015

Tencent to fully open WeChat Payment for overseas transactions: Shanghaiist

Wow. Second thing this morning that I did not know.
This time that's it's that Silicon Valley is playing catch up with China. Not the other way around.
It's Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp and Co who are lagging behind the likes of WeChat which is owned by Tencent Holdings (disclosure: we hold Tencent Holding shares).
WeChat has a Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) of $7. That's 7 times that of FB-owned WhatsApp.
WeChat has "Apps within Apps" like the "Wallet" payment method mentioned in the link below. It's kind of like a portal.
And so I've downloaded the WeChat App, and am now wandering around it.
I've often wondered why our smartphones can't be used more widely to pay for small purchases and why our wonderful Octopus system in Hong Kong can't be embedded in our phones.
So here's China leading the world in this technology.
Just as it's leading the world in commercial cloning, in the post immediately below this.