China Mobile to Revamp Fetion to Fight Back against WeChat

A leaked internal report (source in Chinese) by Fetion, the IM service from China Mobile revealed the fact that the rise of Wechat, or Weixin, has really threatened the peaceful life of the biggest carrier in China. However, the telecom giant sill chose to press on and aimed to save the SMS back to life. According to the report, China Mobile has recently convened some internet bases, international companies and mobile research centers on the restructure of Fetion.

After looking back the rapidly developing year of OTT businesses, the carrier now has realized the difficulty carriers shall meet in the future. Two years ago, China Mobile finally opened its door to other carriers and enabled free-texting over other operators’ platforms with a Fetion-based text messaging service.

Currently Fetion enjoys 99.32million active users, up by 15.4% yoy, and 5.31million peak concurrent users, which has grown by 78% yoy. After 2011 China Mobile cut down its input in the messaging services, last year the operating input in Feiliao is less than RMB 5million. This number is not even 1% of how much Tencent spent on Wechat in 2012.

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