MANILA -- A major Chinese Internet company plans to establish a local office “soon” as it beefs up its presence in the county.
Justin Sun, director of international WeChat operations of China's Tencent Holdings Ltd., said the company is bullish on the prospects of WeChat in the Philippines because of the growing number of users of smartphones in the country.
“The Philippines right now is our most important market in Southeast Asia,” Sun said in an interview with ABS-CBNnews.com at the sidelines of the Mobile Festival 2013 at the SMX Convention Center.
“The Philippines has a big population and the economy continues to grow,” he added.
Sun remarked that the local office will focus in marketing and operations, while the research and development will be led by the head office in China.
“We will also be leveraging our partners’ experience and experience to promote WeChat,” said Sun.
Developed by Tencent, WeChat provides mobile text and voice messaging communication services. The app is available on several platforms such as Android, iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Phone and Symbian.
WeChat also supports various languages like traditional/simplified Chinese, English, Indonesian, Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish, Malay, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Italian, Thai, Vietnamese, Hindi and Russian.
It runs on wireless fidelity (Wi-Fi), second generation (2G), third generation (3G) and fourth generation (4G) networks.
Founded in 1998, Tencent has grown into one of China's largest and most used Internet service portals. It has maintained steady growth under its user-oriented operating strategies.
In 2004, Tencent Holdings Ltd. went public on the main board of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.
Sun noted WeChat also plans to explore partnership with major business organizations in the country such as Jollibee Food Corp. and ABS-CBN Corp.
“We are currently talking with ABS-CBN on how to develop a solid business partnership,” he said.
Major Philippine telecom companies Smart Communications, Inc. and Globe Telecom have launched their own WeChat-based promotions to their subscribers.
WeChat is also creating waves in social networking through shared streaming content feeds using “Moments” and location-based social plug-ins -- “Shake,” People Nearby” and Hold Together -- to connect and organize chat up sessions with WeChat users around the world.
Sun said WeChat subscriber’s data is protected through an on-demand contact list backup and retrieval to/from the cloud to protect every multisensory experience with app.
Registration is completed through Facebook Connect, mobile phone SMS/VM, or Tencent QQ. The application was initially launched as Weixin in China in January 2011, with international language support in October 2011, and re-branded as WeChat in April 2012.
The app is available in the app store for iTunes, Google play store for Android, BlackBerry app world and Marketplace for Windows Phone.
source: www.abs-cbnnews.com
