A lot of the things our team here is dedicated to, are to close partnerships with other companies and to make it easier for users do more things through the platform. Everything else is an addition to make people stay longer and be more engaged. Overall, Viber is a leading messaging app in CEE, CIS countries, Middle East & North Africa, and Southeast Asia. We have 85-90% smartphone penetration there. Regionally, Serbia, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Greece are very strong and still growing. Which are the strongest markets for Viber? The directions we are looking towards to are payments, e-commerce, innovative projects, entertainment and events in particular are an interesting niche. We try to make users stay as long as possible and engage them through different services.
Our strategy is to be not only the platform but also an ecosystem of services. Regarding strategy – Viber is, has always been and will remain a messaging platform. There are, however, too many details and regulations, and nothing is final. What I can say now is that it’s related to payments and peer- to-peer exchanges. Regarding services in the region – we are still clearing up the concept. Mastercard wants to make their clients register transactions online and use Viber as communication channel. Momchil Elenkov: We have a pilot project with Mastercard related to loyalty in Hungary. Are you introducing payments? What is actually Vibers strategy? Trending Topics: We heard some rumors on what Viber is doing with Mastercard. We talked to Momchil Elenkov, Telco & B2B Partnership Director at Rakuten Viber, about what is Viber up to, is the company trying to conquer the western markets as well and why is Viber actually different from any other messaging apps. So we met the Bulgaria-based team that is responsible for Viber’s development in CEE. Recently the application has introduced a new redesign and we heard the company is working closely with payment provider Mastercard to pilot some new services. Pushing its privacy, encryption and not collecting any data as a USP, Viber generates revenues from fee-based service like long distance calls to non-Viber users and from branded communication.
As of September 2018, the app has a bit over 1B users worldwide and claims it has surpassed WhatsApp in Russia. However, there’s one more not so small player on the messaging platforms market that costed the Japanese giant Rakuten $900M back in 2014 and it is trying hard to penetrate Eastern Europe – rather successful. China has its WeChat, Russia and Latin America are dominated by WhatsApp. The Western part of Europe and the US have Messenger and WhatsApp.
0 kommentar(er)
