WeChat report reveals festival trends

More than 768 million people participated in sending and receiving hongbao, or red envelopes, through the nation’s leading social media platform WeChat, during the six-day Spring Festival holiday from Feb 15 to 20, an increase of 10 percent year-on-year, according to a report released by WeChat on Wednesday.

Users from Guangdong, Shandong and Jiangsu provinces led the country in grabbing the largest number of red envelopes.

The most generous user this year was a man from Chongqing, who sent out 2,723 red envelopes in just six days. A man from Nanchang, capital of Jiangxi province, was one of the luckiest people during the Chinese New Year, receiving a total of 3,429 red envelopes.

Hong Kong topped the shopping destination choices for Chinese mainland outbound tourists, with Thailand and Japan in second and third places, respectively. Consumers from the post1990 generation made up the largest portion in terms of overseas spending, according to WeChat.

In the domestic market during the New Year holiday, users spent most in the retail sector, restaurants and traveling, the report said.

During the six-day holiday, 229.7 billion messages were sent on WeChat and 2.8 billion posts were made on WeChat Moments. The use of video and audio calls reached 17.5 billion minutes.

During the period, the highest number of simultaneous online users for mini games reached 28 million per hour.