Comment by bobthepanda
1 year ago
It’s not clear that Chinese owned monopolies are any good at breaking out. They seem to suffer from the same problem as Japan where their market is so unique and insular that a lot of products do not carry over all that well.
WeChat, for example, is the end all be all megaplatform in China but never took off with any Western consumers simply because they’re uninterested.
It also goes bothends, there were numerous western messaging apps that come and go, wechat has been around since the AIM and blackberry messenger PIN days. Where are those two protocols/messsaging apps now?
It isn't insular, it's just it was the only local solution - same for Line having a lock on Japan and Thailand but not much of asia, and kakaotalk for Korea.
Wechat hasn't really been super popular since AIM days. ~15 years ago when I was in China I don't think it even existed, and 10 years ago there was significant numbers of people using qq still instead of WeChat (or rather not in addition to? Lot of people still use both).
I don't think it overtook qq until like 8 yrs ago? At which point AIM was already discontinued, and 10 years past any kind of popularity.
Have you tried signing up for WeChat? It's nearly impossible to get an account.
Alibaba and ByteDance have both successfully broken out.
Two that prove the exception, not the rule. And ByteDance isn’t meaningfully a monopoly in any sense of that word. What are they monopolizing?