New Chinese messaging app Zidan Duanxin takes on WeChat

Challenger is barely 2 weeks old but has already been downloaded 7.2m times

Financial Times — China’s growing band of challengers to Tencent and Alibaba has added a new member to its ranks: an app that is taking aim at the messaging world dominated by WeChat. Zidan Duanxin is barely two weeks old but it has already become China’s most downloaded free app in the Apple store, according to market data company App Annie.

This has prompted WeChat, the Tencent-owned platform with 1bn user accounts, to improve its own voice to text translation, according to analysts. The app had been downloaded about 7.2m times by Friday, according to Qimai Data, a provider of online data services.

Zidan Duanxin, which means “bullet message” in Chinese, raised Rmb150m ($22m) in just seven days ahead of its launch. It is the brainchild of Luo Yonghao, a 46-year-old former English teacher who also goes by the nickname “Fatty Luo”.

Mr Luo has built a wide following as an entrepreneur, in part through the novel product launches deployed by Smartisan, the smartphone maker he founded, that witnessed customers buying tickets to attend the events.

He has also won plaudits for his championing of consumer rights, most notably when he took a sledgehammer to a refrigerator in protest against manufacturer Siemens’s alleged lax quality controls.

Messaging is a challenging sector to disrupt, with even Alibaba struggling repeatedly to build a social network capable of taking on WeChat. Mr Luo, in a post on social media site Weibo, conceded that “uninstalling WeChat is not realistic”.

But like analysts and hardcore fans, Mr Luo believes Zidan Duanxin can become a niche product without needing to topple its biggest rival.

Matthew Brennan, of China Channel consultancy, pinned the company’s early success on three factors: the personality of its founder, resentment among some users over WeChat’s market dominance and a number of superior features, including its voice to text translation capability.

“This is definitely not a WeChat killer,” he said. “But you could see it being a niche thing with hardcore followers.” Being a minnow also has the advantage, at least temporarily, of being below the radar. WeChat is heavily monitored, making Zidan Duanxin “a much safer place to send sensitive information”, he said.

This year has seen a spate of challengers taking on China’s tech giants. Douyin, the short-form video streaming app, sent ripples across the industry, winning users’ time not just from competing video services but also from other entertainment such as Tencent’s gaming.

In retail, three-year-old Pinduoduo has wooed shoppers and merchants and launched an initial public offering recently, giving it a market valuation of nearly $30bn.