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China’s Group Messaging Giant to Get English Name, WeChat, and Go Global

Weixin is already the world’s biggest group messaging app, having last week accrued 100 million users. But that was achieved mostly thanks to enthusiastic Chinese users. Now, new reports suggest that Tencent (HKG:0700), China’s social media giant, will give its app an English name – WeChat – in order to take it international. The WeChat branding will come in v4.0 of the app which is due in the coming weeks. Already, Tencent has snagged the wechat.me URL but has not yet made the name changes evident on the site. The reasoning perhaps is that ‘Weixin’ is a puzzle to pronounce to non-Chinese speakers, especially that ‘x’ which would probably be mis-pronounced as ‘z’ or ‘s’ by speakers of most other languages (actually it’s fairly close to the English ‘sh’ phonic sound).