Claudia Bacco, Managing Director – EMEA for RCR Wireless News, has spent her entire career the telecom, IT and security. Having experience at an operator, software and hardware vendors and as a well-known industry analyst, she has many opinions on the market. She’ll be sharing those opinions along with ongoing trend analysis for RCR Wireless News.
Throughout the year there has been a great deal of spotlight placed on Whatsapp and over-the-top messaging services as a result of the Facebook acquisition. Is it secure or not? Will my data be shared or not? Is Facebook watching?
When this acquisition happened, it seemed the U.S. market didn’t get it, not surprising if you look at the usage stats.
As of the end of the second quarter, the usage stats for the top ten countries with Whatsapp penetration among mobile users (source: Statistica):
Where is the United States you might ask? Only at 8%.
All of this aside, how has the Facebook acquisition impacted Whatsapp? There was a lot of speculation that everyone would move to a more secure platform, such as Threema or Telegram. (These are encrypted solutions developed in Europe if you aren’t familiar with them.) Although there was some initial panic with users making an immediate switch, you can see that usage of Whatsapp is still staggering, with more than 500 million registered users worldwide.
Some things you might not know about Whatsapp that could be indicators for other players in the messaging space in the future. (And hopefully thought provoking for mobile operators as they think about the future.)
- More then one million new users register each day.
- Seventy-percent of registered users are active every day. This isn’t one of those apps you sign up for and forget about, it seems this audience is engaged.
- The average number of times per day a user checks their Whatsapp – 23. Come on, you all know that person who checks at least 50 times.
- The average user sends more then 1,000 messages per month.
- Think Whatsapp is just about sending text messages? Think again … it’s about MMS. Seven-hundred million photos and 100 million videos are shared on Whatsapp, every day!
- Fifty-four billion Whatsapp messages were sent on New Years Eve.
- There’s a new medical condition referred to as “Whatsappitis.” Seriously. But isn’t that just carpal tunnel syndrome with a more sarcastic name?
- Whatsapp doesn’t spend a penny on marketing, PR or customer acquisition.
Ovum predicts that by 2015, there will be 2.6 billion subscribers to data and social messaging services. This is only the start of further sharing services that will impact mobile operators’ networks driven by OTT players. There is an opportunity here for operators to work now to offer solutions to integrate these offerings. Or the OTT players will continue to pass them by.
Operators are starting to see the light and some Whatsapp partnerships are coming on line. For example, Vimpelcom and SingTel have announced partnerships in Asia and TataDoCoMo in India. Econet in Zimbabwe launched an unlimited Whatsapp plan in February with plans for 30 cents daily, 95 cents per week and $3 per month in order to allow their market demographic to sample data services. The Whatsapp traffic on their network as of May accounts for 23% of their network activity … in just three months. The implications here are huge.
One partnership of note is the E-Plus partnership in Germany. This is the first partnership to actually co-brand the service with a Whatsapp branded SIM. All Whatsapp voice and data is free with this monthly service and all non-Whatsapp voice and data is charged at normal mobile plan rates. There are over 30 million Whatsapp users in Germany (this accounts for 90% of all smartphone users in the country). Consider the implications to networks of this size if this usage is unplanned and uncoordinated in a traditional OTT fashion.
Hopefully mobile operators heed the warning of these examples and see the opportunities in their future by becoming striking more partnerships with OTT providers.
