Dennis Hau is the Head of IPC (International Product Center) at Tencent. He joined the Tencent group almost over five years back in 2007. In his current role, he is responsible for the overall expansion strategy and operations for Tencent international, which is aimed at entering newer markets and capturing the brand’s position as the world’s largest Internet Company. Dennis specializes in driving M&A activities, Portfolio Management, Organization management, Internet Services globalization as well as services Localization and has just recently earned an EMBA degree from the Kellogg-HKUST program. In an exclusive interview with India Digital Review, Dennis Hau discusses Tencent’s plans and strategies towards building the WeChat product base in India.

WeChat started in 2011 in China. What was the idea behind launching WeChat in India now?

WeChat has a very short history. It was launched in 2011 and we got into the international market in early this year that is 2012. The philosophy behind WeChat is as the slogan says ‘the new way to connect’. We started to explore the smartphone user platform where we are seeing a lot of users are growing into. As the hardware network is getting ready we are seeing a big growth even in our home country China. Since then, we are seeing a pretty good traction within the market that we were focusing on and we found that the WeChat has a very good opportunity in global basis.

I believe smartphones should not be restricted by geography. Since then, WeChat is one of the very unique products from our company and we position it as an international product.  So, the philosophy is to position it not just a communication tool but it is a tool that can leverage smartphone technology features like location, shake functions etc to help connect people to each other. In the first level, we are connecting people using the contact list and then extending it to location base so people can use feature called ‘look around’.

After the connections have been made, people can do more social activities. Infact, WeChat is very unique service that starts to create social graph on top of contact list. People can share pictures and contact that they like and it has been showing very encouraging usage. Creating social graph is not that easy as we have to protect our user privacy unlike other socio services where the information about the user is shared. So, user can actually segregate information that they want to share with their particular set of friends. Therefore, our aim is to provide innovative and unique social service for user to really connect to each other in a comfortable way.

How has been the uptake of WeChat in India since launch? What is the number of registered users and active users for WeChat in India?

We launched our service in the end of July 2012, and we have surpassed 200 million user base in a global basis. Unfortunately, we don’t disclose user base by country but definitely it is showing very good traction. One of the indicators is that we are climbing up on the app store and at the same time the ‘look around’ function is now showing more Indian users and their concentration is growing which is encouraging.

We did a focus group with college students and I was surprised to notice that many of them were already using WeChat and this has happened without much promotion. The good thing about WeChat is it being simple so any new user can master it just 10 minutes. Another interesting thing is more and more users are adopting WeChat as they find our QR Code is more colourful with pictures embedded in it than BBM and WhatApp. So, this has given us the confidence that while we continue to do our localisation studies, the service is pretty much well adopted in the Indian market.

We have the dominance of services like BBM, WhatApp and new entrants like Hike. How big is the competition here and what are your plans on competing with such services?

First of all, we don’t compare ourselves to the other services. Our goal is to provide unique and innovative way to connect people. We believe we will win the users on the parameter of novelty. Our philosophy ‘new way to connect’ is not limiting us as communication software. We are seeing people adopting push to talk option more than typing. And now we also supporting official accounts that we started to introduce some content providers creating an official account of a news publisher and allowing them to push their content to our database. We are also planning to introduce offline to online connections where a merchant can reach his buyers and vice versa. Thus, we are evolving based on our vision and not following what others are doing.

Tencent owns a minority stake in Ibibo. Is there any plan to merge the WeChat service to ibibo’s mobile offerings?

We positioned WeChat as a global app. We do a lot of globalisation with ibibo on a plug-in basis. The core product itself will stay as a core which is suitable for the global market. We see the world’s flat where all the users live in but where the globalisation kicks in there we will provide open API where third party developers can actually develop applications and share their content to WeChat network and leverage it as a communication network.

What are your plans of expanding WeChat in India? Are you looking at tapping enterprise consumers?

Our primary focus is on mass smartphone market. In different countries, some enterprises are already using it as communication apps to their staff. We see it as a sub-set only and they are not our only focus. Right now we are focussing on mass and to improve our user experience especially on the performance. In one or two months we have a new release across platforms we continue to innovate ourselves but at the same time we also improve our infrastructure at the backend to improve the performance. However, it actually grow into different particular segments its organic it just happens and at the same time we get user’s trust to stick on to this platform. We don’t worry about monetisation so at this moment we are focussing on user experience and innovativeness.

What would be WeChat’s business model in India?

Revenue generation is not our focus and with the user base being established there are different approaches that can be used to generate revenue like say by leveraging content partnerships.

Besides WeChat, Tencent owns QQ.com, QQ messenger, web search SoSo.com, and a third party online payment platform called Tenpay, an equivalent of Paypal. What are your plans of making these services available in India?

As of now, we don’t have the burden of taking Tencent existing products to different markets. WeChat is definitely a platform that we are looking to build and then we will bring the other services as per the market needs. So, presently we don’t any plans to bring the mentioned services in the Indian market.

What are your immediate priorities in the Indian market?

User experience, localisation and performance improvement are our three basic priority areas. We spend a lot of time in understanding the users in India and the performance of the service. The immediate priority is to understand user’s ‘loves’ and ‘hates’ and what is their pain. There is lot of work for us to do from the backend like in the ‘look around’ function we have to make sure that when an Indian user  browses the function he/she should find fellow Indian users so with growing user list we have to put the local users on top and create a connect.

Many consumer focussed internet companies in India are now building their brands through huge marketing. What are your plans on that?

We have a different approach towards marketing and we are starting to do some online advertising. Offline, we are focussing on how we can get into different communities like college students whose friends are using WeChat will also sign up to connect with them. We are also planning to work closely with Ibibo to expand our marketing plan. I believe there is no point ramping up the marketing until and unless we improve the user experience. So, primarily we will improve the user experience then will do the marketing. I sincerely believe that if the product itself is good enough with unique services, it will grow internally within that community.

What is your view on how comfortable is the Indian user with mobile chat services?

As I mentioned earlier about the focus group that we did with colleges students, I observed that they pick up innovative things very easily. I think the youngsters adapt to the new technology easily and I’m very glad to see that. There may be certain functions that they might not find easy at the beginning but with correct marketing and awareness it can be dealt with.

Compiled by Saumya Tewari