Online orders made through Tencent's WeChat short video and live streaming function, Channels, grew more than 244% in 2023 over the previous year. It enabled the platform to nearly triple gross merchandise volume (GMV) in 2023, according to information released during the app’s annual Open Class Pro developer conference held in Guangzhou, capital of Guangdong province. While the platform’s exact GMV figures were not released, conference attendees were told that the number of orders made through WeChat’s video function – marketed as Channels – grew more than 244% in 2023 over the previous year. A number of attendees at the conference, which was held as a closed-door event exclusive to industry partners, confirmed the reported growth rate. Tencent did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
WeChat’s high GMV performance last year showed how prescient Tencent Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Pony Ma was in December 2022, when he told an internal town hall meeting that short video was key to the company’s future. The progress of WeChat Channels has been closely watched in China’s internet industry, as Tencent quietly made inroads into the live-streaming e-commerce market to take on ByteDance-owned Douyin and Kuaishou Technology – the country’s two largest short video platforms. Tencent was expected to hit CNY100 billion in e-commerce GMV, a measure of the total value of goods sold online, through WeChat Channels last year, according to a report by Chinese media outlet LatePost.
While the e-commerce turnover on WeChat Channels is small compared with those of Kuaishou and TikTok’s Chinese sibling Douyin, Tencent has bet on swiftly building its online retail business on the back of the country’s vast number of WeChat users, estimated at 1.34 billion. Tencent also plans to expand its live-streaming e-commerce-related headcount and broaden its product categories, as the WeChat Pay team builds the vital transaction infrastructure to facilitate online payments, according to the LatePost report. WeChat Channels has already become a major driver of Tencent’s advertising business, which increased 20% year-on-year in the third quarter, the fastest growth achieved by all of the company’s business segments in that period. During the second quarter, WeChat Channels raked in CNY3 billion in advertising revenue. Launched in 2020, Channels has been growing rapidly and had about 813 million active users as of June 2022. That number was ahead of Douyin’s 680 million users and the 390 million on Kuaishou, according to estimates by Chinese data analytics firm QuestMobile, as reported by the South China Morning Post.
