Amid heavy promotion, Alibaba Group’s new mobile-messaging app has attracted more than 10 million users in the past month alone, the e-commerce company announced today.
At a press conference in Hangzhou, Alibaba officials acknowledged that the app, Laiwang, still has a long way to go in competing with WeChat, Tencent Holdings industry leading chat app, which has more than 300 million users.
But officials expressed satisfaction with Laiwang’s fast start since launching in September. WeChat, or Weixin as it is known in China, took five months to reach 4-5 million users when it launched in January 2011, according to local media.
Alibaba Group Chief Executive Jonathan Lu attributed Laiwang’s growth to differentiating features that users like, such as a function that allows users to send a voice message that is subsequently deleted after the receiver has heard it and the ability to form chat groups of up to 500 people.
Alibaba, owner of China’s leading online-shopping platforms Taobao Marketplace and Tmall, has made Laiwang a focal point of a push into the mobile Internet, seen as crucial to the success of the company in years to come. Alibaba management has adopted poker terminology of going “all in” — which means betting all your chips on one hand of cards — to indicate how the company is pulling out all stops to succeed in the mobile sector.
“Smartphones have become an integral part of life,” Lu said in a statement. “With consumer behavior changing, Alibaba Group must follow society, technology and users down the mobile path and into the wireless era.”
Jack Ma, Alibaba’s founder and executive chairman, publicly announced in October that he had shut down his WeChat account in favour of Laiwang. Ma also encouraged Alibaba employees to sign up 100 of their friends and family to help the app gain traction. This week company said that it will soon open up its Laiwang app to celebrities, brands and companies, allowing them to have public accounts so they can better interact with fans and users.
“Alibaba entering mobile is not to support our e-commerce services,” said Lu. “In the coming 10 years, the more important direction will be e-commerce supporting mobile services, supporting Laiwang and supporting Weibo and Autonavi.”
Alibaba Group invested in Chinese online maps firm Autonavi and Sina Corp’s microblogging platform Weibo in the first half of 2013.
The impact of mobile on Alibaba’s business units is already clear. During this year’s 11.11 shopping festival, 21 percent of all transactions took place over mobile devices, up from five percent a year ago.
Taobao Wireless, the mobile Taobao application, had 79 percent of the mobile shopping market by transaction value in the third quarter, according to Analysys International. According to the latest company statistics, Taobao Wireless had 400 million users.
