Rakuten has tried to grow in the US market using its purchase of Buy.com, but that's not working, partly due to a disastrous rebranding. They also had a failed venture in China. So Viber may be successful if they just leave it alone, but trying to use it to make Rakuten better known in the West would be a horrible idea.
Naver (Korean) has the Japanese messaging service LINE (which was created by some of its Japanese employees at its Japanese subsidiary), but can't gain any other ground. And I definitely can't see the Chinese internet companies becoming successful in Japan or South Korea, given their penchant for censorship and nationalistic differences.
However I believe Chinese companies have a strong edge regarding the messaging market. Chinese users are much more early adopters when it comes to messaging apps which enable Alibaba or Tencent to test new ideas much faster. Now that competition is getting fierce in China, they are expanding aggressively elsewhere and thus bring their deep expertise in the messaging market to the US.
Tango's CTO Eric Setton just got $250M from Alibaba praised this strategic move saying that tapping into Alibaba will “bring a crystal ball into (their) boardroom… Asia has insight that is around a year ahead of the West right now” (http://thenextweb.com/mobile/2014/03/20/chat-app-tango-raise...)
What stunning software products / innovations / market leaders came out of Asia in the last decade that didn't exist in the West or Silicon Valley either beforehand or at roughly the same time?
China has their own social networks and messaging apps because they're sponsored (openly or behind closed doors) by the state. The reason they allow their citizens to use these apps is because these particular ones are being used to intercept intelligence data, and are not controlled by western entities. Does the chinese government have a hook in face book? If they did, would they want the US intelligence agencies who are undoubtedly closer to FB to have access to their citizens data? Probably not. Just as Chinese intelligence agencies control the net over there, US and western intelligence agencies control the internet over here, but in a much more secretive way as we've seen with the recent snowden leaks. The reason Chinese services aren't successful in the west is because the powers that be don't want them to be successful, because then the west wouldn't have the proper hooks in the Chinese social networks which are undoubtedly used for mass spying.
No, one thousand time No. It hates internet as a whole.It tries, a lot of times, throwing a huge money to put its own players on the market, but mainly in the search engine space, like Remin, Jike, Pangu and the most recent, ChinaSo. Only after all these attempts turn out to be failures, it looks back and try to corporate with the private companies.
As a native Chinese, I think Wechat is a much better choice than Facebook, in a lot of ways. Imagine what would happen, when Facebook put their Facebook app, Whatsapp and Instagram together, plus gaming, mobile payment and other bunches of stuff. That is what WeChat is right now. And it is used by hundreds of millions of people. And that is impressive.
2. WeChat just deleted 3 weeks ago at least 30 popular accounts that distributed political and legal news articles http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230373080...
LINE was the first to make money with stickers (since copied by everyone and their dog).
WeChat is using their platform to sell life/health insurance http://qz.com/184783/cancer-insurance-is-wechats-newest-vira...
Western messaging systems on the other hand are all very vanilla. Now, everyone is stumbling over each other to add "snapchat" disappearing chats while LINE/WeChat are actually monetising.
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Users in APAC are also a lot more innovative in how they use these messaging platforms. There are dating/Tinder services built on top of WeChat.