Tencent Holdings Ltd. is opening its WeChat groups and will soon allow Alibaba’s Tmall and Taobao, among other social media rivals, to display their own external shopping site links, marking the slow removal of obstacles between Tencent and its Chinese rivals, Bloomberg reported Monday (Nov. 29).
The new functionality will be available “soon” in beta form for group chat participants to share links to third-party e-commerce platforms, Tencent said in a blog post Monday, according to the Bloomberg report. WeChat users will eventually get more content-sharing options, the post says, without detailing what those options will or could be. Users will also be able to tweak their settings on external sharing.
More than 1 billion Chinese people use WeChat daily for eCommerce and other online tasks. Until now, Tencent had allowed users who upgraded to the latest version of WeChat to share external links only in one-on-one conversations. Now, the company is eliminating the warning page that pops up when users click on external links.
Tencent has feared losing customers to ByteDance’s Douyin without some sort of barriers in place, but Chinese tech regulators have warned internet companies to stop the practice as part of a broader effort to eliminate so-called walled gardens, which help companies keep consumer data to themselves.
Related news: Chinese Gaming and Payments Platform Tencent Holdings’ YOY Revenue Growth Hits 19%
Earlier this month, China-based FinTech Tencent Holdings Ltd. cited “new regulatory and macroeconomic developments” as the main reasons behind its 3% revenue increase in the third quarter of 2021. That’s its lowest increase since Tencent went public 17 years ago.
Chinese officials have imposed limits on the amount of time people can spend playing online games and mandated that Alibaba adopt Tencent’s WeChat Pay on its platform in September. Regulators also ordered Tencent and Alibaba to stop blocking one another’s website links on their platforms.
See also: EasyTransfer, Tencent Offer Chinese Students Platform for Overseas Tuition Payment
Tencent announced earlier this month it’s teaming with EasyTransfer to simplify overseas tuition payments for Chinese students, meaning they can use Tencent’s WeChat Pay secure payment infrastructure to make overseas college tuition payments to more than 1,200 universities and school across 80 countries, including the U.K., Australia, Canada and the U.S.
We’re always on the lookout for opportunities to partner with innovators and disruptors.
Learn More