Alibaba’s DingTalk tops 500 million users as it goes after Tencent’s stronghold in online chat
- Alibaba’s workplace communication app revealed that its user base grew 25 per cent between January and August
- Internet giants in China are seeking new growth in the enterprise market after the Covid-19 pandemic gave a boost to remote work and learning
DingTalk, one of China’s most widely used workplace apps, said on Wednesday that its number of users increased from 400 million to 500 million between January and August, giving its developer Alibaba Group Holding a stronger foothold in the country’s office communication and work-related social media market.
The platform also reported that it was used by over 19 million institutional users, including enterprises, schools and other organisations, by the end of August.
In comparison, WeChat Work, the corporate version of Tencent Holdings’ super app WeChat, said it had 130 million active users from 5.5 million enterprises and organisations as of January.
“The high-quality growth of DingTalk comes from not only the increase in daily active users or monthly active users, but also our ability to discover and solve user problems,” said DingTalk president Ye Jun.
Alibaba is the owner of the South China Morning Post.
While DingTalk still has less than half of WeChat’s 1.2 billion users, the Alibaba platform has been aggressively upgrading its service to entice a wider variety of users. On Wednesday, it launched a new version of the app with more than 20 functions, including “intelligent note-taking” and mini apps.
