Laiwang, a copy of wechat
Who is “Laiwang”?
Laiwang is a new social networking tool published in 2013 by Alibaba, which allows the instant communication between the correspondents. The name “laiwang” is a Chinese expression in pinyin, which means sending the message and getting feedback during a communication.
Laiwang is the first Alibaba product that is independent from the e-commerce, its basic function is the connection between friends. This function is very similar to wechat. In fact, the entry of Laiwang into the social networking market is the beginning of the competition between Alibaba and Tencent.
Why Alibaba launched Laiwang?
Alibaba is founded as a company contributed to e-commerce and it has win a great success, taobao is the largest B2B website in China; while Tencent specializes in social networking, after the publication of wechat, Tencent won the second asset since the creation of qq, wechat became the first platform for communication between friends in China. However, the success of wechat causes an affect to Alibaba because wechat begins to enter into the e-commerce market and the fact that wechat possessed many users is really a great threat to Alibaba.
On this occasion, Alibaba made a counterattack by publishing Laiwang and announced its entry into the social networking market. Confront the strong rival wechat, Laiwang has its avantage–Alibaba possesses a lot of user data through its existing fruit such as Taobao, Tmall, Alipay and Aliwangwang.
See the website of Laiwang www.laiwang.com
The war between Laiwang and wechat
As the function of Laiwang and wechat is almost exactly similar, competitions and conflicts between these two are going continually. Tencent claimed that Laiwang is a copy of his wechat while Alibaba said that some functions of wechat are copied from Laiwang. Who can win the final success in this war is still a mystery at present.
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