Le Blog

We have been widely documenting the difficulties encountered by WeChat in its expansion outside China. But there’s one company which is doing pretty well outside China: Alibaba. What’s the secret of Jack Ma’s company to make a killing outside its home market? How Alibaba is killing it outside China Alibaba is growing fast in China. But outside China, it’s growing …

WeChat has been slowly ramping up its ad game since it opened up “Moment ads” a bit more than 2 years ago (in January 2015). But there is one target demographic that is the prize of many marketers: Chinese tourists traveling outside China. And WeChat now offers solution to target this very group of customers. How do WeChat ads target …

AI superstar Andrew Ng leaves Baidu On the 20th of March, Andrew Ng, the superstar A.I researcher (and co-founder of Coursera, where his course about machine learning gathers more than 30,000 extremely positive ratings)  who was heading Baidu’s Artificial Intelligence unit in Silicon Valley left Baidu. If his departure message published on Medium suggests that “everything is for the best in …

For any resident of major Chinese cities, it has been hard to avoid the war going on between bike sharing companies Ofo, Mobike, Bluegogo and the like. Each backed by Chinese Internet giants, they are tearing themselves apart to win China’s new prized market. But this war has consequences beyond China. It spawned the creation of similar startups outside China. …

Update: this guide was initially published on the 8th of February 2015. We updated it on the 7th March 2017 to reflect changes in the registration process. Thank you to Alipay for providing guidance on the new registration process. It is not exactly a WeChat related topic, but following popular demand, we will show you the application process on Alipay …

This week, a set of news about WeChat and the digital ecosystem of China: Mini programs are already losing traction You can now send and receive gold on WeChat New data shows Alipay red packets get beaten by WeChat… and also by QQ! WeChat Mini Programs losing traction Mini Programs have been launched only a few weeks ago, on January 9th, …

Tencent said they wouldn’t participate in the “Red packets” (红包 / Hongbao) war this year (they didn’t spend a dime giving away money to users) …well, they won it anyway! Key highlights: 14.2 billion red packets sent in 24 hours, 76% year over year growth 760,000 were sent in 1 second Guangdong is the province which sent the largest number of …