This can make international expansion confusing at best: sensitive content on international accounts might be blocked in China. It’s no secret that China has a heavily censored Internet, and that WeChat is a heavily censored product. WeChat is not among the top five iOS apps in Indonesia, India, Brazil, or other key markets, according to Bloomberg. The same article quotes Tencent founder Pony Ma acknowledging the company’s difficulty in expanding overseas. Chinese state media Xinhua has reported that other than in Malaysia, where it has become the messaging app of choice, WeChat users elsewhere are mainly ethnic Chinese. Yet its strong push in countries like Indonesia, India, and Brazil were not a smashing success. In 2013, Tencent enlisted soccer star Lionel Messi to advertise the brand in television and online. Tencent declined to comment on WeChat’s international expansion, but it seems fair to say that WeChat is not yet the global player Tencent hoped it would be. Today how many Americans, aside from the ones with connections to China, have even heard of the product? There seemed to be room for WeChat to shake things up, but that’s not what happened. market, but none had taken the country by storm. The company also saw an opportunity: there were already messaging apps in the U.S. Having enjoyed success in its home market, seeking growth abroad was a natural next step. In 2013, Tencent announced that it was opening an office in the United States with the aim of bringing WeChat to America. For many Chinese, WeChat is a wallet and communication platform, and it’s impossible to imagine life without it. WeChat has millions of verified official accounts-including brands, celebrities, even hospitals-that can receive mobile payments using its network. Foreigners who visit China are awestruck by the complete dominance of this super app, which people use for everything from sending messages to hailing taxis to buying real estate. There may be no better example than Tencent’s WeChat, the mobile messaging and payment app that has over 900 million monthly active users. But that wouldn’t explain why the reverse is also true: China's superstar companies also struggle to make it in the United States. It may be tempting to blame Chinese censorship or government restrictions. Uber, Amazon, and Apple are just a few examples of firms that have been humbled by the Chinese market. Once they got there, their superpowers seemed to vanish. Some of America’s most formidable technology companies have headed to China.
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