Tencent: The WeChat Red Envelope Initiative

Just before the celebration of the 2014 Chinese Lunar New Year, Tencent, the world's fourth largest Internet company, launched a mobile application for its popular WeChat platform: the Red Envelope. By clicking on a virtual red envelope icon, gifts of money could be sent to or received from friends and family to celebrate this special occasion. Combining a Chinese cultural tradition with modern social networks, this simple initiative soon became a major milestone in China's mobile market. It brought more than eight million users to Tencent's WeChat Payment platform in the first eight days after the New Year, helping the company break the barrier of mobile payment adoption among its vast user base and giving it a significant advantage in the country’s competitive mobile payment market. This somewhat unexpected, record-making success, also made many companies rethink how to survive and thrive in China's rapidly growing technology sector.