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Tim Culpan, the author of the article which is mentioned is simply wrong, because he doesn’t understand the deeper issues at work when it comes to getting wider acceptance for WeChat overseas. Moreover, he is only taking one slice in time, now, and assuming that Tencent is not doing anything. It is active, but when you are doing something, it is often not wise to talk too much about what you are doing.I have a digital marketing agency, ChinaBridge Digital Marketing[1], which helps non-Chinese companies sell their products and services to Chinese by reaching them on their mobile apps. Because WeChat has more than 1 billion registered users in China alone, it is a significant part of our media toolkit. But let us look at several different levels of issues which make Tim Culpan think that Tencent is leaving money on the table:International and political regulatory issuesUser issuesAdvertiser issuesTencent and WeChat have been able to expand quickly in China because Tencent has always had a good relationship with the Chinese government, which means the Chinese Communist Party. This is a relationship which the company has carefully managed since its founding in 1998. The company has followed all government regulations, and in return, the company has been given the green light to add users and expand its business. The leading issue from the Chinese government’s point of view has to do with security; the Chinese security services need to be able to access their servers and data anytime they want, and Tencent has given it to them. These are the rules of the game in China.The Chinese government likes this because if there is trouble with content, it knows who to go to in order to ask for information: Tencent. Because the government has issued its business license to Tencent, and can suspend it anytime for serious infractions, Tencent complies with urgent requessts from the government. Pony Ma, the founder and CEO of Tencent, also has a direct channel to the highest levels of the government, and can provide his input. Of course, he does not talk publicly about what input he provides.These direct channels with the government have given the BAT (Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent) companies a special advantage: As long as they tell the government what they want to do ahead of time, and they are given government approval, they can go ahead with what they want to do.This explains why Tencent was able to launch WeChat Wallet over Chinese New Year in 2014, and using one of the best campaigns in marketing history, get more than 100 million users in three months.Now, let us compare that to the United States, which in 2018, still does not have anything like WeChat Wallet or Alipay, where people can scan a QR code to complete a transaction. Why can Chinese consumers go cashless, carrying only mobile phones when they go out, but Americans are still stuck with relatively old transaction systems?The reason is because laws governing money transfers in the US are built on an old payments infrastructure which are regulated on the local, state and federal levels. There are lots of laws and lots of regulations, and even the newest solutions, such as Apple Pay have had to build their system on top of this ancient infrastructure. Who sits at the pinnacle of this payment infrastructure? Visa, Mastercard and American Express, which take an average 2% for each transaction. Of course, they have an interest in maintaining this payment infrastructure as long as possible.WeChat Pay and Alipay are disruptive because they have leaped over credit card services provided by Visa, Mastercard and American Express. Tencent and Alibaba are large, distributed businesses which offer many other services and can offer transaction services effectively for free without taking a cut on each transaction as the major credit card issuers do. When Chinese consumers use WeChat Wallet to pay for something, their account is directly debited in real-time [RT], and if a foreign currency payment needs to be made, that is made in RT too. There is no need to wait.So the advantage of Tencent working closely with the Chinese government is that it has not had to deal with complicated local, state and federal government regulations; as long as the Chinese central government approved their proposal, they were good to go. Furthermore, there was no opposition from entrenched business interests because in China, the central government has final say.One of the arguments against WeChat Pay expansion outside China is that customer data, even for non-Chinese outside China, would have to go through servers in China for final approval. Given the current political and trade tensions between the US and China, and distrust of many Chinese practices in the EU, this is a very serious issue which has directly affected WeChat’s expansion and acceptance outside China.This affects the end user directly because, depending on whether you downloaded WeChat in China or outside China, you will have completely different versions of the app. If you download it in China, you will have a full version of WeChat Wallet, waiting to have your bank account information entered so that you can use it immediately. If you downloaded it outside China though, chances are you cannot enter any account information into WeChat Wallet because there is no local banking partner .In order to deal with this situation, WeChat would need to have non-Chinese banking institutions which could access user account information in real-time, without having to send that data back to China. Of course, this takes time to do. For this reason, Tencent has been investing with different banking institutions; I believe that this is being done with an eye to partnering with WeChat Wallet, and have written about this in the ChinaBridge blog[2] and China marketing newsletter One Billion Prospects.This is why WeChat is focusing now mainly on Chinese outbound tourists and travelers; these are the people who have the full version of WeChat Wallet on their mobile phones. Before WeChat has established its network of banking partners outside China, it would make no sense to market to non-Chinese WeChat users because they would not be able to complete their transactions in WeChat.Coming back to Tim Culpan’s article for Business Week, it makes no sense for Tencent to disclose who it is talking to about banking regulatory issues in different countries until it has a signed agreement which can be announced. Refusal to reveal these discussions does not mean they are not taking place. International banking discussions are very easily affected by political relationships, and that is especially the case in current times.This brings us next to advertiser issues. The way most advertisers think about reaching Chinese consumers is that they need to invest at least $20 million to get their China operations going, hire a marketing director for China who knows China, send her to China, and she will hire a local ad agency, and give them about $2 million to spend annually just to kick off their ad spending, then hope and pray that this will eventually lead to sales of their product or services. This is the way it has been for a long time, and that is the way most advertisers think.Now, if I tell someone that they don’t need to have operations in China, they don’t need to hire and send a marketing director to China, that they don’t need to hire anyone who speaks Chinese because the agency will take care of that, and that they can begin to test sales of their product or service from where they are now, and that they can still reach any Chinese anywhere in China or outside China just through the mobile phone which they have in their pocket or handbag which is usually the last thing they look at before they go to sleep and the first thing they look at when they wake, and that they can do this for a first-year budget of US$250–500K, would that be disruptive to the current advertising model?I would say that it is.But getting there requires a leap of imagination, and leaps of imagination start with asking the right questions. In this case, the right question is “Why do I have to spend so much money and go through so much trouble to reach Chinese customers when just about every single one of them is carrying a mobile phone, and which they use more than two hours every day? Why should I spend money on desktop search, television, print and billboards when I can reach them through their most popular apps?”These are the kinds of questions my agency looks to hear from prospective advertising partners, because these are exactly the right questions to ask.I hope this information is useful. If you would like to stay on top of the latest news and trends for marketing to Chinese via mobile, I would encourage you to subscribe to the newsletter One Billion Prospects here[3].Footnotes[1] What We Do[2] Will WeChat Pay Break Out of China With N26?[3] Form 2 | ChinaBridge Digital Marketing

This is happening / has happened across the board for all consumers (my own bill came to ₹ 13,200 something). There are two reasons for this:During the lockdown months and weeks of April, May, June, the company (MAHADISCOM or MahaVitaran) could not send their person place to place to read the meters. For these three months, they used average reading for the previous three months to bill.The company revised the tariff effective 1 April, 2020.In July, the company person came and took the reading. The July bill is based on actual metered numbers from March, 2020, i.e., 3 months consolidated bill. Because of the unique slab structuring, almost all went into the highest slab. These 3 months are summer months in Maharashtra and when AC is used to the maximum. As we all know AC is the highest consumer of electricity, followed by water heater. The averages used for the months of Dec, Jan and Feb is when power consumptions is much lower (hardly any AC used).The July bill credited the payments made in April, May, June (the averaged months). But the bill of July is so high that it “beats the expectations”. Hence the inflated bill. There is no option - you will have to pay the bill.p/s. MahaVitaran claims that they had sent SMS text to all stating that we should download their app and submit own readings during those 3 months. I never received those messages as I was in UK during that time (bill payment is via direct debit from bank). If we had done that, we would have been much better off because for those 3 months, we would been billed at actual instead of average.

Best food options like non-vegetarian and vegetarian food in train is something which every passenger craves for. A smooth and enjoying travel via train is directly connected with food which is a crucial factor. Any passenger with a reservation in any class and having a PNR number can order food of their choice from the desired restaurant and enjoy them at their seat. It’s all packed in your smartphones and mobile application. Passengers can download RailRestro mobile application or visit the website to explore food options of their choice and order them within a few clicks. That’s true!Steps to Order Food in Train during Journey:Download our Railrestro app or visit our website online.Enter your PNR number and click on “SEARCH FOOD”.Choose your food items from the menu and it will be added and billed in cart.Pay the bill online via Debit/Credit Card/Net Banking/Paytm/PayUMoney/Freecharge.Enjoy your food at your seat. It will be delivered at your desired station.