New Delhi (NVI): Demand for chat apps is surging rapidly in China as millions of white-collar workers are forced to work from home following the coronavirus outbreak and companies keeping their staff away to contain the virus.
The work-from-home policies have led to a surge in downloads for WeChat Work, DingTalk, and Lark – three workplace chat apps operated by Tencent, Alibaba, and ByteDance respectively.
Provinces across China have ordered companies to shut or make staff work from home for at least another week after the Lunar New Year holiday. Many firms may extend that further.
According to data from research firm App Annie, both DingTalk and Lark saw downloads across China’s app stores surge over 350% during Chinese New Year week compared to one week prior.
Both DingTalk and WeChat Work suffered connectivity issues due to heavy usages, the companies confirmed in public statements addressing user complaints.
Downloads for WeChat Work surged by almost 70% in the same time.
Couriers and round-the-clock
Companies are also relying more on China’s army of couriers, who are keeping many self-quarantined residents fed and supplied. Jingshu Chen, who runs virtual reality startup VeeR, said that large video files her team once accessed on an office network are now delivered to employees’ homes via hard drives with couriers.
Some fear financial disruptions
John Rood, who runs a digital marketing agency in Shenzhen, said the nationwide work-from-home experiment could cause late payments from clients due to banking system quirks.
“A lot of Chinese banks require you to use a USB drive to log into your account, for security measures,” he said.
“But if the financial departments didn’t bring the USB drive home before the holiday, our payments will probably be delayed another week. “Others said they felt pressure to be online 24/7 as there was no means of clocking off as normal now.
One client manager at HSBC bank said the work-from-home policy has her feeling she cannot leave the house lest she miss a message in her department group chat.
“Your boss is in the group, so you need to be as fast as everyone else,” she said.
