A feud between China’s two top tech companies has apparently ended up on a bitter note. The cold war between Alibaba and Tencent has now culminated in Alibaba banning its sellers from using Tencent’s popular messaging app, WeChat.
Alibaba has a huge presence in the Chinese cyberspace and is considered among the leading tech companies in the country. Tencent, on the other hand, is also a company of a substantial tech presence. The duo have apparently had their differences which have now lead to the falling apart of the two.
Their differences were recently made manifest when Alibaba forbade its sellers from making use of WeChat. The e-retailer claimed that a number of sellers were using the messaging app to harass other users. Within hours of banning WeChat from use by sellers, Alibaba has forged an alliance with Sina Weibo, which is the Twitter equivalent of China.
The partnership with Sina Weibo would allow Weibo users to directly make purchases from Taobao, the popular online marketplace of Alibaba. The deal is also sweet for Alibaba in that whereas WeChat has nearly 200 million monthly active users, Weibo boasts nearly 50 million daily active users. This essentially means that the bulk of Weibo would be directly linked to Alibaba, bringing over a huge number of potential buyers to the e-retail hub.
According to an independent analyst in China, “Weibo competes for many of the same users and usage as WeChat, so Alibaba is obviously going to be pushing Weibo rather than a competitor. We’ll see more and more integration of Weibo and Alibaba’s assets going forward.”
Courtesy: TechCrunch
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