MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA- The boom in smart mobile devices at cost effective prices and growing adoption of mobile internet has led to a high demand in social messaging apps in India. However, a turning point came with the entrance of WhatsApp in the Indian market. The free messaging service began to rapidly displace the subscription based BlackBerry Messenger as the primary social messaging service in India. This created a messaging app rush in the market as more consumers flocked to social messaging services migrating away from SMS.
The widespread popularity of messaging apps amongst consumers has triggered a battle to gain market share between messaging titans in the Indian market. WhatsApp, BBM and Facebook Chat are doing well but hot at their heels are Line and WeChat. The two players have ramped up in efforts in growing their market share, especially WeChat which is famous for its recent high budget marketing campaign in the country.
Adding to this incumbents like Nimbuzz have taken the partnership route to gain market share in the market. While Bharti’s Hike, has most recently announced the addition of stickers (emoticons) to the application, which aims to be their trump card in winning the messaging race. Ovum believes that the competition ahead is intense and messaging players will need to partner with telcos and rapidly evolve their platforms in order to survive in the market. Players will need to diversify their service offering by adding games, social media and other social services to stay a step ahead of the competition.
