Competition in the free chat software market has become stronger than ever with the participation of a lot of large technology groups, both foreign and domestic.
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| South Korea's Kakao Talk software allows free SMS messaging in all smart phone operation systems including Android, iOS, BlackBerry, Windows Phone and Bada. |
Kakao Talk is available in 13 languages and has 75 million users from 230 countries all over the world.
The free chat software market has become even more crowded since China’s Tencent launched its international version of WeChat in Vietnam last April.
Other foreign giants such as Line Facebook Messenger, Viber, Whatsapp and Yahoo Messenger are also present in the Vietnamese market.
Kakao director Hwang Sung Hwan said the Vietnamese free chat software market had real potential in Vietnam due to the growing number of smartphone users.
The senior executive said he could see competition in the market increasing, and in order to compete in Vietnam, Kakao Talk would have to pay more attention to the “localisation” of utilities to compete with its rivals.
Vietnamese groups jump on the bandwagon
Having realised the attractiveness of the free messaging software market, domestic internet providers are trying to get involved.
VNG is one of them. Le Hong Minh, general director of VNG, said he could feel the market heating up in mid 2011, and decided to invest before it was too late.
Vietnamese technology groups understand that the market has been controlled by foreign giants. However, VNG still “joined the game” by launching Zalo in mid 2012. To date, Zalo has launched on iOS, Android and Nokia S40.
As a newcomer to the market, Zalo has made a giant leap to conquer the domestic market. It has reached an agreement with Nokia to integrate the Zalo app into Nokia’s Asha 305, 306, 308, 309 and Asha 311 that launch this month.
Zalo is also available at the Nokia Store for S40, S60 users to download.
Minh revealed that in 2013, VNG would continue to invest in Zalo and integrate the software into other mobile devices.
The free messaging software market has also attracted start up firms as well as IT giants.
In late 2012, Wala released the Wala Chat app. Wto become the eighth service provider in the domestic free messaging software market.
Nguyen Thanh Hoa, the founder of Wala, said they were following an ambitious plan to develop the app into a platform for the mobile environment, which would become an ecosystem for valuable content services for enterprises and the Wala-using community to exploit.
According to Hoa, competition among service providers was strong, and only really useful apps would be able to survive.
“At present, the services are free of charge, but in the future, if just two percent of users paid a fee it would be a great success,” Hoa said.