WeChat has an enormous influence on how business and individuals communicate, both in China and around the world. As the biggest manufacturing power on the planet[1], China sits at the heart of millions of global supply chains with a huge impact on how goods get ordered, processed, distributed, and shipped around the world.
This makes WeChat a default choice for collaboration and communications within the supply chain. Threats to ban the service in the U.S. are causing significant concern[2] to companies that rely on instant, ubiquitous communication between the U.S. and China, so much so that some are even raising lawsuits[3].This is certainly a valid concern but we believe it points to another, bigger issue: A significant lack of fast, responsive, reliable, ubiquitous supply chain communication tools[4]. Part of the dependency on WeChat and similar platforms is that there are not that many great alternatives.We think it’s worth exploring:
- WeChat and its importance to business
- The supply chain impacts of a potential WeChat ban in the U.S
- How WeChat highlights the overall problems with supply chain communication and how we can solve them
WeChat and its importance to businessWeChat is the fifth most popular social media app in the world[5], and the most popular social app in China. The service passed a billion users in early 2019 and is now approaching 1.2 billion users. In China, WeChat is used by 90 percent of the Chinese population and accounts for over a third of the country’s internet traffic[6].Many of WeChat’s users are individuals, but businesses have also become incredibly reliant on WeChat and its WePay platform. WeChat Work is used by more than 2.5 million companies and has over 60 million monthly users[7]. Over 32 percent of users are corporate businesses, with another 28 percent being self-employed, freelance, or remote workers[8].There are several business advantages to using WeChat[9]:32 percent of users reported selling products through WeChat40 percent of users carry out customer service through the app34 percent cut costs by using WeChatMany Chinese businesses rely almost exclusively on WeChat to run their operations[10].
