The cracks in Chinese companies are beginning to show. Alibaba Group recently added a rival’s payment system Tencent to some of its applications, among which are Ele.me (food delivery app), Damai (the ticketing platform), Shuqi (the e-book reader) and Kaola (imported products site).
Previously, it did not allow users to click on links sent by chat to, for example, Alibaba’s Taobao Marketplace product listings.
An Alibaba representative confirmed the news to Bloomberg to whom they explained that the company will continue to seek common ground to better serve consumers. Therefore, it may be that in the future we can see WeChat Pay on some of the company’s flagship platforms, such as AliExpress or Taobao; From the latter it is known that a representative of the company said that it is working “actively” to introduce multiple payment methods on its platform.
Will we see more changes in China?
The Chinese government has been pressuring the country’s technology companies for several months, to which has been added pressure from Beijing to free the internet in the country and stop being controlled by the companies.
The first changes were known in early September when Tencent allowed WeChat users to link to rivals’ content for the first time in years. An action motivated by pressure from the technology regulator in China that warned companies to stop blocking links to rival services. The companies that have been accused are Tencent for WeChat, Alibaba for Taobao and Tmall and ByteDance for Douyin.
Alibaba has also made other attempts to unblock the relationship with WeChat. In early 2021 he tried to launch his own Taobao Deals lite app on WeChat.
The integration of WeChat Pay with Alibaba applications could be the definitive step for these two companies to feel the alliance and we begin to observe new collaborations. We may end up seeing Tencent introducing Alipay payments into their services.
