Milestones are important for corporate culture; knowing where a company has been allows it to better consider where it's going, as well as how to measure success. For Chinese-made messaging app WeChat, though, success has been clearly established by a recent milestone: it cleared the 600-million global user point.
Perhaps even better for the company is that this wasn't a sign of a plateau, but rather the result of steady ongoing growth. Just during the first quarter of 2015, the company reported that it was serving over 549 million users a month, which means just two quarters later, it had actively cleared 600 million, gaining around 10 percent.
Admittedly, it's still lagging behind competitors in the field; the app needs another 200 million or so to match the levels posted by Facebook (News - Alert)'s WhatsApp. Moreover, WhatsApp seems to have something of a higher growth trend afoot, announcing its 800 million mark in April 2015, while being reportedly only at 700 million in January. Some have even suggested that this pattern has carried on, and now WhatsApp is poised to hit—or may have already cleared—the 900 million active user point. WeChat even has a lot of domestic competition to deal with, including things like the LINE messaging app and KakaoTalk. But WeChat seems to be holding the Asian market well, and some have already suggested that a push in North American marketing might be a help here.
Additionally, WeChat has a noteworthy package to help defend its user numbers and potentially gain more. WeChat reportedly comes with many things that WhatsApp doesn't, including stickers, video calling, and even a means to record six-second videos. WeChat has made a particular focus of making the app extraordinarily easy to use, and by many reports, seems to have done the job.
If one thing could be gathered from this report, it's that voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) is making incredible headway, and a lot more users are turning to some variant of this service—be it Skype (News - Alert), WeChat, or any of a host of others—to get access to voice service at any distance without paying the per-minute rates of a phone company somewhere. That in turn is going to do some serious damage to phone company profits over the long term. After all, with voice service, there aren't that many ways to differentiate the service; a voice signal goes out, is received, and a new voice signal responds. That's pretty much it. Trying to get extra services in there is kind of limited, so it becomes almost a commodity, and price is the only real way to differentiate.
Still, there are plenty of people out there with regular phone service, and there likely will be until high-speed Internet access is universal. That may be where phone companies make a stand, but by then, the writing may already be on the wall for per-minute voice service. WeChat and its contemporaries, meanwhile, will likely continue to grow unabated, and may be ultimately the hand putting that writing on the wall.
Edited by Rory J. Thompson