Money talks

3 April 2013 By John Foley Follow @johnsfoley

The Chinese dot-com’s killer app, WeChat, has been targeted by envious telcos who face losing profit. It’s not just a case of squashing innovation. It’s more like an old monopoly fighting to keep its economic rents, and an upstart hoping to create some of its own.

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Users of China’s popular online messaging service WeChat may have to pay fees to appease the country’s top telecoms companies, a government official was quoted as saying by a Chinese magazine on March 31.
Miao Wei, head of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, said that the ministry was studying WeChat’s impact on the telecoms market, and would consider allowing operators to charge Tencent, the online gaming and networking group that owns WeChat, though the amount would not be high.
WeChat, known in Chinese as Weixin, allows users to send texts and voicemails over the Internet from smartphones. Since launching in 2011 it has amassed 300 million users. Tencent said on March 20 it would invest heavily in the product and integrate games and content apps, as well as stepping up marketing outside China.
The number of point-to-point text messages sent in China fell 11 percent in the first two months of 2012 from a year earlier, Caixin reported the MIIT as saying.

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