Several large U.S. companies have expressed concern about the consequences of the Trump administration’s executive order targeting WeChat, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal. “More than a dozen” companies, including Apple, Ford, Walmart, and Disney, are all said to have met on Tuesday with White House officials, detailing the negative impact of a ban on WeChat on their own companies.
The executive order was signed Thursday night and explicitly blocks “any transaction related to WeChat.” It is set to go into effect in a few weeks, but because of its broad language, there is still a lot of confusion about the intended scope of the ban, which is subject to the Department of Commerce. One reason for the call between the White House and the U.S. companies was to try to get some clarity in that regard, according to the WSJ.
Managed by Internet giant Tencent, WeChat is the dominant messaging app in China, and is also widely used for payments, e-commerce, marketing, and more. It is no exaggeration to say that it is a ubiquitous presence in modern Chinese life, and that any smartphone without access to it would be a very hard sell.
This means that a ban would directly hurt Apple, as an American company that can no longer offer viable products in the world’s largest mobile market. An App Store without WeChat would be even more of an issue for the iPhone in China than the lack of Google services for Huawei elsewhere.
But even American companies with a further relationship with the smartphone sector have cause for concern. If you can not market products or handle transactions on WeChat, their operations in China and their ability to reach Chinese consumers would be significantly hampered. These companies hope that the scope of the executive order will be limited and clarified in the coming weeks, says the WSJ.
