Essay: Globalizing We Chat - Challenges And Strategies.

In the attachment to this email are two documents, the base one is titled "WeChat - A Global Platform", while the second one on Tencent is just for references. The case study topic is "Internationalization of WeChat - Strategies for Becoming a Global App". We need to analyze WeChat's present situation in China and countries where it is already present significantly, and provide solutions for expansion overseas, and competing successfully with other instant messaging apps and other completing mobile apps/solutions.

The Challenges of Internationalization

The We Chat can be considered as one of the most famous messaging application, which are used worldwide. The We Chat development team had directly discovered a business opportunity in the tradition of red envelopes. The organization wanted to enable the concept of the digitization and socialization of the cultural conventions making it a very much viral aspect in the field of the application. We Chat emerged in the year 2011 and started out as a purely text messaging platform which is created by the Tencent holdings. Eventually by the end of the year 2015, the platform majorly boasted around some 600 million daily users who were active. It was considered a tremendous growth over the tenure of last few years and mainly disrupted the concept of the telecommunication aspect, but replacing it with the need to send the SMS. The main aim of the report is to put emphasis on the concept of the internationalization of We Chat taking into consideration a global platform concept. The present situation, which is being faced by the application in the China and the countries where it is mainly used, is the main concept of the report. The solution for expansion for the application is another point of emphasis, which is being applied to the concept. On the other hand, it can be stated that the market demand of the user should also be taken into consideration which is clearly mentioned in the report which would directly help the application to get exposure into the international market.

The main point factors which played a vital role in the application not being able to take a stand in the international market is that, it is very much launched at a later stage. By the time the application was launched internationally, there was already few dominant players in the market relating to the chat application. The concept of the localization was not properly taken into consideration. It can be stated that the we chat application did not offer nearly all which the Chinese versions used to offer to the people and other applications provided. The we chat did not take into consideration all the necessary need of the user before the application was launched into the international market. The main concept should be take into consideration what other competitors take into account and what new inventions are being taken place in the market. The We Chat did not take into consideration all these aspects which leaded to a huge failure as many of the advanced features were available in the market area.

Strategies for Expansion

The main strategy that can be incorporated into the concept of the reaching the global application is stated below:

• Selection of the countries and the language should be done wisely: The focus point should not be always towards the languages or country which are very much famous. It should be taken into consideration that aspect that where the stated application has a potential to play a vital role. If the application is already made available in one language, the check for the comments, download figures and review should be done to directly find out the language preference and the location from the point of view of the user. It can be stated that the obvious choice of the language such as Japanese, Spanish, French or German may not work well for the application at all. The concept of the user statics may help the initiators to know about the language spoken relating to the majority of the user application. Releasing the language, which is rejected, by any of the competitors can be a vital form of tactics in the field of increasing the business of the application.
• Forget about the concept of machine translation: If an application wants to reach the global market, the application would be requiring more than just the concept of translation and definably more than the concept of machine translation. The download figure won’t send the message if the message, notification and the button in the application are unclear or stated properly or is very much confusing from the point of view of the user. To adapt the concept, the content to the audience who is new, the work should be done with translator who is professional or on the other hand, localizer who can directly adjust the need of the application and the expectation, which the user has from the application.
• Make sure the application is localized: To localize the application it should be taken into consideration that there should not be any issue that can delay or disable the whole concept of the localization. The code should be looked into to find out any hard coded strings, string dependencies and concatenation. The concept that should be applied into it is that the code and the text should be separated and adding of the comments for any string should be done. This would directly ensure the functionality of the localized application. Ones the application is fully prepared for the process of localization it will be very much easier and quicker to make it available for the audience in the global market. Form this concepts implementation it can be considered to be the first step towards the benefit that comes along with the mobile application which is multilingual (Xiang, Chang & Chen, 2015).

We chat is also known as “Wei Xin” in china and most of the countries. It is most of the most popular social network application in China, and mostly active users hit around 650 million in the 3Q-2015. Today it can be stated that it is becoming a trend or a lifestyle for the china culture. Its holding company, Tencent, has mainly showed its global ambition in the prospective by the internationalizing Wei Xin (Jia, Kenney & Seppälä, 2017). Only after nearly nine months’ tenure after the launch of the Wei Xin in the year 2011 January its English version was created. In the year 2012 in the month of April, We Chat replaced WeiXin as its English name (Li, Luo & Zhang, 2015).

We Chat configuration supports account registration via the feature of the internet in at least 100 countries and region. There are nearly 19 version of We Chat in different language for the users to locally choose from English, Chinese, German, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Arabic and Thai etc. The application can be directly being downloaded in almost most of the mobile operating system like the IOS, android, Symbian and Blackberry. In the field to advance the technology, the application made is possible to invite one’s contact on twitter and Facebook directly in order to join the We Chat via an interface (Ming, 2017). It can be stated that with a few overseas offices, We Chat is rolling out on a country-by-country aspect through the implementation of local partnership concept, acquisition or investments and seeking to reinforce its reputation in the global market (Weijun, 2016). However, it can be directly concluded that We Chat’s users are still mostly in China and its presence in the overseas market mainly focus the part of Southern Asia, Southeast Asia and Latin America. Even though more and more Westerners use the application it is mainly for keeping in touch with their Chinese friends or friends living in china and their own families (Guiyan & Lixia, 2016).

• Flexible platform, which enables scalable development of the mobile application: Ones any company build more than one application it should look for options for development efforts. Platform provides the modules to support critical element for the management purpose. Mobile application is very much modular in recent times which basically offer standard based interface and work with multiple design methods in the front end (Ma & Wu, 2017).
• Data should be very much secured across devices, cloud and network: The recent advancement in the sector of technology it has made the concept move to the concept of the cloud. In this concept, the data is always kept secured between a corporates data center, mobile device and the cloud.
• Mobile application moves to transactional: in any of the application is very much needed to connect to the data from numerous systems in the back end. IT should create mobile application access optimization to a variety of enterprise system such as Oracle and SAP.
• Mobile application become a collection of data that represents an entire workflow: The data should always be presented in a format that can be easily understood by the user. This puts direct emphasis on the concept of the format that is applied to the texting, which is applicable in the application (Junren, Xuanxuan, & Xue, 2016).

In the following section, the competition market relating to the WeChat application is explained taking into consideration few applications, which plays a competition role with We Chat.

• Viber: The Viber released a new version with the additional features. Before the implementation of the update, only the emotion was Fun involved in the application. Now, like the concept of We Chat, the user interface is very much pleasant, fun stickers are available; the location of the user can be shared.
• Facebook: The concept of Facebook also has a chat function. This firm also introduced a specific application in the year 2011 in the month of august. Reacting to the competition offering, the form will be offering now Voice messaging and not merely text messaging. “Facebook Poke” is very much similar to snap chat, which is expected to be a success and will help the firm to be one of the major dominating player in the field of service related to chat.
• Google: The Google has been very much advanced with the function of the chat, which is included in their Gmail since a tenure of nearly 5 years. It can be expected that the company would be planning to launch a new version of the chat service, which is in service in present times. On the other hand, it can also be estimated that it could make a betterment in the field of social application taking ten concept of the Google+ user to a disruptive usage (Tian, 2017).
• Tango: The tango application can be a vital player in the near future taking into consideration the aspect of chat service. The start up in the application was the introduction of the new features such as text messaging and the concept of voice messaging. If Google decides to directly buy the startup set up, the giant of the America would be back into leading group of the mobile applications chat aspect and technology (lao et al., 2017).

Conclusion

It can be concluded from the report that the concept of the technology of the We Chat plays a very vital role in the China. It can be stated as one of the important form of communication medium in order to communication in the form of text message or voice format. Bringing into account different competitors the We Chat has a task in hand to move towards a globalized concept of marketing which would be beneficial form the point of view of the user who use it. The main aim of the application should be to reach the international market for which different strategies can be incorporated that would directly help the application to excel and reach an international market standard. The application can even replace the need for the mobile phone as the people directly shared their We Chat id, rather than using mobile phone or the email addresses. On the other hand, it can be stated that after the launch of the We Chat application it has developed an array of applications within the framework of their own application. Taking into consideration the future prospective of the application it can be stated that the users Main market demand should be always taken into consideration. This would directly help the application to reach more users and get exposure into the international market.

References

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