WeChat has now reached 1 billion monthly active user accounts worldwide
The app’s user base got a boost over Spring Festival from millions of virtual hongbao senders
For the first time ever, WeChat’s has recorded more than 1 billion monthly active users.
China’s most popular social messaging app hit this rather impressive milestone during this year’s Spring Festival when an estimated 688 million people used WeChat to send out virtual hongbao to their friends and family on Chinese New Year’s Eve.
The announcement was made on Monday on the sidelines of the National People’s Congress sessions in Beijing by Tencent CEO and China’s richest man Pony Ma. Last November, the company had announced that WeChat’s monthly active users were up to 980 million.
It’s worth noting that for these figures WeChat is really counting monthly active user accounts. Since individuals are free to open multiple accounts, fewer than 1 billion people actually logged onto WeChat over the past month.
Of course, WeChat is more than just a way of sending your friends stickers and small bits of change, the app has become an integral part of daily life in China with its extremely popular WeChat Pay function and its various Mini Programs, which aim to make all other apps unnecessary.
In December, China even announced that WeChat ID cards would be rolled out across the country in 2018 to replace traditional hard-copy identification cards, giving WeChat control of not just people’s money and contacts, but their identity as well.
