腾讯黄铁鸣：已有1.7万家合作伙伴加入企业微信 – 36Kr
What happened: WeChat Work, the productivity version of social networking app WeChat, has more than 17,000 third-party partners in its ecosystem, vice president of Tencent’s WeChat business group Huang Tieming revealed on Tuesday at Tencent Global Digital Ecosystem Summit held in Kunming of southern China’s Yunnan province. The partnering entities offer services including staff training, survey platforms, online contract signing, and more. To support these services, more than 4.5 million application systems have been integrated into the app, which now offers 231 application programming interfaces (APIs).
Why it’s important: Tencent’s WeChat is known for offering a unified social networking experience. WeChat was a fusion of everything that mattered, blurring the boundary between the work and personal lives of its users. To address the issue, Tencent rolled out a standalone version of the app for business entities in China three years ago. The app had 1.5 million corporate entities registered on its platform and 30 million active users as of May 2018. Despite the huge success of WeChat, WeChat Work is playing catch up with Alibaba’s mobile workplace tool Dingtalk, which had 400 million users as of September. Competition in the productivity services market is heating up as Chinese tech companies shift their business focus to enterprise-facing services.