400 million daily active users, covering more than 200 sub-industries, more than 40,000 active service providers, and the "Mini Program Economic Circle" has begun to take shape

On September 9, the WeChat special event "WeChat Discovers New Growth" kicked off the Tencent Global Digital Ecosystem Conference. Mini Programs, WeChat Pay, WeChat for Business, Soso, and WeChat AI made their joint debut, bringing new information such as the digital tool upgrade and ecosystem openness of Mini Programs, multi-scenario applications of "payment as a service", "WeChat for Business Smart Growth Solutions for SMEs", and Soso's "Service Search", providing new ideas for the recovery and future growth of all industries.

Covering more than 200 sub-industries, the "Mini Program Economic Circle" has initially emerged

After more than three years of continuous co-construction, the "Mini Program Economic Circle" has begun to take shape. In 2020, the daily active users of Mini Programs exceeded 400 million, covering more than 200 sub-industries, with more than one million Mini Program users and 5.36 million "Mini Program practitioners". At the same time, there are more than 40,000 active third-party service providers in the WeChat ecosystem.

As early as 2019, the transaction volume of mini programs exceeded 800 billion. From January to August 2020, the GMV of physical goods in mini programs increased by 115% year-on-year, and the GMV of brand merchants' self-operated GMV increased by 210% year-on-year. The fastest growing industries were daily chemicals, luxury goods, shopping malls and department stores, with the daily chemicals industry growing by as much as 1,710%.

The "Mini Program Economic Circle" uses WeChat Mini Programs as the core link, connecting WeChat's ecological capabilities to deeply assist various industries and sectors, thereby generating an economic form with huge social and economic value.

Different from the regional city economic circle, with the development of the new economy led by the Internet, the economic forms of Internet tools and platforms that rely on specific advantages are forming various "new economic circles". In comparison, the mini program economic circle is a typical ecological economic circle, which is fast-growing and full of vitality.

The Mini Program Economic Circle uses WeChat Mini Programs as the core link, connecting WeChat ecological capabilities such as WeChat Pay, Enterprise WeChat, WeChat Search, and WeChat AI to form a panoramic ecological matrix, create a digital super solution, and deeply assist various industries and sectors, becoming a new late-developing and strong growing territory in the national Internet economy.

Continue to release new capabilities and use mini programs as a link to promote collaboration within and outside the ecosystem

Since 2020, Mini Programs have completed a comprehensive upgrade from social to digital economy products. This year, Mini Programs have launched functions such as Mini Program live broadcast components, Mini Program order management, transaction guarantee, and WeChat mini stores.

Mini Program live broadcast started public testing in February. Currently, nearly 100,000 businesses have opened Mini Program live broadcast. As it is more suitable for private domain live broadcast, Mini Program has opened up a new blue ocean market for the live broadcast industry.

Since the full launch of WeChat Mini Stores, the cumulative number of open categories has quickly exceeded 2,000. Mini Stores can help merchants quickly generate online store products without development, greatly reducing the threshold for merchants who do not have development capabilities to enter the Mini Program ecosystem and conduct online digital operations. Some merchants received more than 1,000 orders within 30 days of opening, earning considerable revenue.

Previously, Tencent has provided seven weapons for enterprises to conquer the digital fortress, namely official accounts, mini-programs, mobile payments, social advertising, enterprise WeChat, big data, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and security capabilities. With these seven weapons, Tencent provides the most effective digital interface and the most complete digital toolbox for governments and enterprises, becoming the best digital assistant for the latter.

Today, based on the core role of mini programs, Tencent's "seven weapons" are closely linked and coordinated with each other. At the same time, WeChat community as a basic weapon and WeChat search as a new weapon are also integrated. In particular, the linkage between WeChat payment, enterprise WeChat and mini programs, on the basis of high interoperability, completes the user's reach, retention, and conversion, and builds a digital business closed loop; WeChat search, AI and mini programs connect services, users and ecology through search and WeChat AI voice capabilities. As a result, the ability support of the mini program economic circle has become more and more perfect.

Create digital super solutions to deeply support industries and sectors

The ecological capabilities of the mini program economic circle are integrated with each other, providing a set of digital solutions with diverse combinations, rich levels and wide applicability to meet the personalized needs of different industries.

First of all, by combining WeChat Pay, Sogou, and WeChat AI, the "Mini Program Economic Circle" realizes the interaction of capabilities between the public and private domains.

Through WeChat Pay's "payment as a service" and merchant vouchers, the transformation of operations from public to private domains has been achieved. In the process of building digital capabilities for enterprises, WeChat mini-programs play a role as a carrier for private domain operations. Through the integration of online and offline channels, it continuously converts members and accumulates private domain users and digital assets.

Fashion brand Esprit has achieved strong association and binding with shopping guides, mini programs, and user terminals through the "payment as a service" capability. Based on this connection, Esprit achieved a GMV of nearly 300 million in a live broadcast in February. McDonald's connected to the merchant coupon mini program and achieved an average daily redemption of 1 million coupons in July; Baiguoyuan also used the WeChat mini program to achieve the marketing and distribution of merchant coupons, distributing about 1.5 million merchant coupons every day through the mini program and official accounts.

The core goal of WeChat SouYisou is to allow truly high-quality content to reach users efficiently through search. In terms of mini-program content access, Mafengwo's mini-program has been deeply involved in SouYisou's content construction in the travel category. Currently, in the overall traffic of Mafengwo's mini-program, traffic from SouYisou accounts for more than 50%.

Connecting content and users is also an important direction for WeChat AI. At this conference, WeChat AI cooperated with HP and Intel on the HP Star series and HP's 13-inch convertible notebook. Tencent Xiaowei was embedded in these two product systems in the form of a whole-machine voice assistant, and completed the connection with Tencent ecosystem and WeChat ecosystem content services.

Secondly, the integration of online and offline in the mini-program economy is accelerating. The 2020 "Code Economy Impact Report" shows that mini-programs have become a new online entrance for retail stores, and the scale of new members has increased by 6 times. In the shopping mall industry, which fully introduces corporate WeChat into daily shopping guides, the overall GMV of the industry's mini-programs increased by 670% year-on-year in the first half of 2020.

In 2018, Rainbow officially promoted the Mini Program and put the core functions of the Rainbow App online on the Mini Program. After that, it gradually developed and launched capabilities such as group buying, welfare, counter delivery, and live broadcast rooms that are suitable for the WeChat ecosystem. On July 27, 2020, the number of members of the Rainbow Mini Program exceeded 10 million. The continuous and in-depth operation of the Mini Program has become the basic guarantee for Baiguoyuan's live broadcast sales. Currently, the number of members of the Baiguoyuan Mini Program has exceeded 28 million.

In October 2017, INMAN launched its brand mini program. Through public account tweets, store communities, shopping guide system + Moments, and even one-to-one precise membership operations, INMAN hopes to build a closed loop of customer touchpoints based on the WeChat ecosystem.

Finally, the mini program economic circle helps companies move from "traffic" to "retention". Dashang Tengu uses WeChat Pay's mini program cashiering capabilities to reduce "flying orders" and "extracorporeal circulation". The average daily GMV of mini program cashiering exceeds 11 million, achieving better user retention. At the same time, after the epidemic, Dashang Group changed its core strategy to "one live broadcast per store per day", with up to 100-200 live broadcasts per day. In July this year, Dashang's "National Live Broadcast" sales exceeded 70 million.

To achieve the transformation from "traffic" to "retention", more companies are now upgrading their shopping guides to "super shopping guides" through WeChat for Business, and making each super shopping guide a "super portal" for external services. From March to May this year, Le Caesar accumulated 300,000 customers through WeChat for Business, with the repurchase rate increasing from 19.1% to 29.4%, and the average customer price increasing from 98.9 yuan to 104.3 yuan.