To be fair, Kim's StarCraft reflexes have waned as he's spent most of the past decade building a different type of empire. The post Messaging App War: WeChat and Line are Leaving KakaoTalk Behind WhatsApp Should be Worried appeared first on Tech in Asia."I'm losing because I'm doing this interview," jokes "Brian" Kim Beom-Su, as his online kingdom burns down. Facebook is arguably in the hunt with Facebook Messenger. Do you think WhatsApp should be worried here?ĭo note that Twitter isn’t competing in this space, and that they all look small compared to Facebook’s 1.1 billion monthly active userbase. That is, unless WhatsApp’s new features have a say about that.
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That, along with features like huge animated stickers, games, and free calls should help encourage quite a few WhatsApp users to move to another platform. I would still say that zero cost always sounds more appealing than “free for first year only.” So Whatsapp’s first mover advantage may get whittled away by the Asian chat apps’ more comprehensive offerings. And in response to the growing chat app competition, WhatsApp recently made its iOS version free for the first year of use, so users still need to pay eventually. Would the other two apps be able to follow suit too? When you take a look at the business model, all three Asian apps do not charge a dime from their users. Now those three apps are constantly competing with each other in many countries like Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam, and WeChat looks on course to beat WhatsApp in the long run - if only in terms of active users, but not global reach. It’s going to be interesting to see if WeChat can catch up with its rivals in terms of revenue and profit in the near future. But it looks to start doing so soon with its new gaming platform which will launch in the next app update. Tencent-made WeChat, on the other hand, hasn’t monetized from its app yet. Of course it is unclear if Line is scoring bigger profits than KakaoTalk, or if it’s making profits at all. That could well mean that Line is scoring more than four times the revenue of KakaoTalk. What about Line? The Japan-based app nailed $58 million in revenue in the last quarter of 2012. KakaoTalk scored US$45 million in revenue last year, snapping a cool $7 million in profit.
Financial matters Of course there’s one more thing that matters most besides user acquisition, and that’s revenue.
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And while Line and KakaoTalk are hiring Asian stars for their TV ads and marketing campaings, WeChat recently hired a mega celebrity in the form of the world’s top footballer, Lionel Messi. Combine those two numbers and multiply that by a factor of six, and China’s population would still be bigger than that number. Japan’s population is only 128 million South Korea has 50 million people. WeChat’s source of its rapid growth looks to be a lot more obvious: the population of its home country.
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WeChat has a browser-based web app for laptop and desktop PC users. KakaoTalk finally released its desktop app last month. Some started to use such social messaging apps as a replacement to the old Yahoo Messenger. Line launched its desktop version in March last year, which helped people to adopt the chatting app with computers (or to use it surreptitiously while at work!). Some other aspects probably come into play. KakaoTalk just started to be more aggressive in its expansion outside of its native Korea around November of last year. WeChat went global in April 2012 Line saw 50 percent of its user-base was from outside Japan last October, but now that's up to 70 percent.
First is how Line and WeChat took the initiative to expand their apps before KakaoTalk did. Original image credit: csa.com There are a few explanations as to why that happened.
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