WeChat now has 200 Million Users on Its Payments Service

It was gathered from the latest financial results of Tencent – Chinese Internet firm that WeChat messaging app now has 200 million users credit cards on its payment service. WeChat is a best-seller mobile app – one of the services that is stimulating the plans of Facebook for its Messenger business.

Tencent realized a net profit of 7.584 billion RMB or $1.2 billion on revenue of 26.594 billion RMB or $4.2 billion, of which messaging is a vast part of. Weixin and WeChat and Weixin jointly account for 650 million monthly active users, whereas QQ instant messaging service counts 639 million Smartphone users.

Since Tencent doesn’t break out its Wexin/WeChat user number by location, it is not possible to say categorically the proportion of China users that have added their cards to their respective accounts. However, Weixin Pay and QQ Wallet services are only available in China. Observation however reveals that the rising number is inspiring and likely to fret Alibaba that runs Alipay — competitor mobile payments service.

Despite the fact that Alipay tilts on Alibaba’s vast e-commerce network for visibility, a service affixed to a messaging app regularly opened by people has the budding to be a lot more expedient to merchants and users alike.

Tencent has placed colossal importance on facilitating payments. The Weixin service can be used to buy items online, make person-to-person transfers, pay bills and lots more, further than supporting offline transactions in the same way with Apple Pay and others.

Weixin is a product to watch, if you are particular about connecting the dots on where Snapchat, Facebook Messenger and others are headed. Nevertheless replicating the early payments success of WeChat — will be challenging for those who are outside China — and it is still too early to call it an established success in that area.

Games keep on to be the big revenue generator for Tencent on mobile, despite the fact that payments services have huge potential. This past quarter, Revenue from titles on Weixin/WeChat and QQ, this quarter — that monetize through selling in-app purchases — increased by 27 percent year-on-year to arrive at 14.3 billion RMB ($2.25 billion).

Another area where Tencent is experiencing increase in revenue on mobile is advertising. Performance-based advertising revenues jumped to 2.4 billion RMB or $380 million in the quarter, as a result of a contentious move to monetize Moments — the social network feed inside Weixin/WeChat. The total advertisement revenue of Tencent — across desktop and mobile, and as well as its popular video site and news portals — amounted to 4.9 billion RMB or about $770 million.

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