Solving the WeChat problem

Once again, Tencent boss Pony Ma says he won’t be charging for WeChat, according to this Reuters report.  That’s been his stance ever since the story broke in February.

Ma might be in denial, he might be reassuring customers, or perhaps positioning himself ahead of the inevitable user backlash.

But his repeated claim that customers won’t be paying for apps may also points up to a solution - namely that Tencent, and not users, pays the fee to operators.

This is premised on the idea that the charge is necessary because of the extra network costs borne by the cellcos, and in particular China Mobile. When MIIT boss Miao Wei last week confirmed the charge was being planned, he explicitly couched it in those terms.

He certainly didn’t say it was because WeChat app was eroding traditional revenue source.

One reason he wouldn’t say that is because China Telecom and China Unicom have no issue with WeChat – it’s driving data traffic and China Mobile’s customers to them.

Another reason is that, like Ma, he could be trying to avoid the outcry when 300 million consumers discover they’ve lost a favourite service.

In this context it’s worth remembering that he has left it to the operators to work out the details of the charging scheme. A nice bit of footwork.

Of course, it may be that the MIIT is totally on-board with this and sees it as a means not just to shore up the operators’ businesses, but also of reining in other unruly apps.

If that is so it would certainly open up a fresh internet battlefront, but on what we know it seems unlkely.

The path of least resistance is for Tencent to pay a fee to help cover the network costs. This will hurt Tencent a little, but a paid-app arrangement will damage everyone.