The chairman at Chinese internet giant Tencent announced his company’s popular chatting application WeChat will remain free to use, Caixin reported. Ma Huateng said at an internet conference on May 7 that Tencent had reached deals with China’s major mobile telecoms to keep WeChat a free service. It was widely speculated that China’s telecom companies were pushing to have an additional fee structure put in place for WeChat, as the app reportedly uses a high volume of bandwidth. However, many analysts have pointed out that telecom companies have lost lots of revenue with WeChat as customers prefer chatting apps over high-margin SMS services.
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