Chat-happy Indonesians are leading the way with mobile chat
applications. In a few months, three of Asia’s top chat applications
have made their formal introduction onto the market by launching intense
campaigns to garner more users.
In January, China’s Tencent
Holdings Ltd. collaborated with Indonesia’s media conglomerate, MNC
Group, to formally introduce WeChat.
As with other applications,
WeChat is a cross-platform mobile chat application (app) downloadable
for free from various app stores such as Google Play store, BlackBerry
World and Windows 8 store.
Martin Lau, president of Tencent, said
that Tencent was drawn to Indonesia for the “obvious reasons”. “Like
many other international companies, we see great business opportunities
in Indonesia because of its vast size and population on top of its
youthful energy and great economic growth,” he said.
The “less obvious reasons”, Lau added, was that the country could “benefit from the more rapid adoption of Internet technology”.
“WeChat,
as our flagship product, will be part of the first wave of products in
mobile Internet in this country, which has a large mobile population
that has leapfrogged into the mobile Internet era,” he said during the
launch of WeChat.
LINE, a mobile chat application created by NHN
Corporation, the leading Korean Internet company, has already preceded
WeChat into the market. Simeon Cho, the general manager for LINE, said
that the fact that “Indonesians love to chat and do social things” was a
big attraction for chat application companies.
“Chat
applications can therefore be killer and key applications in
smartphones. And as the number of smartphones increase, so will chat
application usage,” he told The Jakarta Post.
He added that the
number of daily downloads in Indonesia ramped up 60 times within a year
by the end of 2012. “Looking at the current pace of growth, we could
have more than 20 million users in Indonesia by this year, we will keep
on increasing our number of users and aim to achieve critical mass by
July,” he said.
The most effective way to garner new subscribers remains through traditional television commercials.
Kate
Sohn, vice president of global business development with Korea-based
Kakao Talk, said that the company hit 120,000 new registered users daily
in the first week of April, following the launch of their advertising
campaign.
“Just one week after we began to air the television
commercial, starring [Korean artists] Big Bang and [Indonesian artist]
Sherina Munaf, our growth was nearly 3,000 percent compared to the
pre-television commercial period,” she told the Post.
She added
that Indonesia was the third largest market for Kakao, but was
number-one in terms of growth. “This is why Indonesia is special for
us,” she said.
But how do these apps make money given that they
are available for free download? Cho said that under LINE’s
business-to-business scheme, brands could obtain official accounts — a
step made by Thai Airways — through which brands could connect with
their followers, in addition to marketing their products and services.
He added that under their business-to-consumer model, LINE sold special edition stickers — or emoticons — to users.
Sohn
said that Kakao, in collaboration with game developers, sold games
through the Kakao platform. Profits were then shared with the
developers. (
Mariel Grazella, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta | Business | Mon, April 08 2013, 11:51 AM)
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