December 18th, Tencent and JD respectively spent $604M and $259M USD to invest in Vipshop, the 3rd largest e-commerce store in China. After the investment, Tencent and JD own 7% and 5.5% of Vipshop. Tencent becomes the second largest shareholder of Vipshop. The investment pricing was 55% percent above the share price of the previous day. Let’s look deeper into …
China’s largest artificial intelligence (AI)-powered content platform, Toutiao, is getting a lot of media attention. Toutiao is currently looking for a new round of investment, with a $30 billion USD valuation, according to the news website The Information. Today we’ll dig deeper into the Toutiao ecosystem. Toutiao App Toutiao is a news display App. It’s specialized in display algorithms that recommend personalized …
News #1: WeChat Shop Mini Program is released! WeChat has just lowered the barrier for Chinese companies to start an e-commerce business. It just released the WeChat Shop Mini Program: a mini-program available to all Chinese WeChat Official Accounts directly from the WeChat Official Account back-end. What does the Mini Program shop looks like? The shop follows the WeChat UX guidelines: …
This week, I had a new retail shopping experience at Hema Supermarket, a retail store launched by Alibaba. What’s special about this supermarket? And does it make sense for Alibaba from a business standpoint? Data data data A traditional supermarket gets limited payment data at the check out. But Hema knows everything about their customers: phone number, the product that …
Today we’re deep-diving into a company that managed to drive hundred of millions of RMB of e-commerce sales by combining videos and social e-commerce on WeChat. The company is called Yitiao and it’s an impressive case study. Company overview About the company: Yitiao is a short-video focused content producing brand on WeChat started in 2014. It started to focus on e-commerce …
You can now make a profit with your WeChat Wallet Last week, WeChat Pay started testing a new feature called Lingqiantong (零钱通), a flexible money-market mutual fund. There is no minimal investment amount, and users can spend their deposit at any time without fees. To give you a better idea of the yield, I made 17.64 yuan in August with 5,000 …
According to 2016 China Investment Ecosystem Report, the number of consumer product startups increased by 58% in 2016. Many of these brands were created by young Chinese founders who are born into the digital era, and are competing against international giants. They sure know how to leverage the Chinese social media ecosystem, mainly WeChat and Weibo, to pick up a …
100 limited edition MINI Cooper, in value of 30 million RMB, sold on a WeChat influencer account in just 4 minutes. How did this happen? And what can brands learn from this? The WeChat Influencer Account This impressive sale was performed by a fashion focused WeChat Official Account operated by Becky Li (黎贝卡的异想世界). The account has 1.6 million WeChat followers, 90% …
WeChat Official Account Reading rate/followers growth rate are dropping According to a New Rank survey of 131 Official Account operators, there is a clear decrease in reading rates and growth rates on WeChat in 2017. As shown in the graph below, 39% of the accounts are experiencing a decrease in their article reading rate; while only 28% are seeing an …
