Blackberry is still going strong in some parts of the world, especially the Middle East, for its BBM service despite Facebook and Tencent dominating the mobile messaging market, said an industry expert.
“BlackBerry Messenger is still relevant with a very active user base in South Africa, the Middle East and Indonesia. There are 42 million registered users in the Middle East, and 70 per cent of the monthly active users in the region are active each day,” said Jun Wen Woo, Analyst Mobile & Broadband Media at IHS Technology.
He said that BBM’s particular success in Indonesia, prompted it to launch its mobile payment service BBM Money there. Blackberry’s growth strategy will be focused on these three areas.
An industry expert said that with WhatsApp stopping support for Nokia and BlackBerry devices running on its own operating system by the end of this year, the US company can focus on its BBM and add more features to attract more customers as it is available across other platforms.
WhatsApp said on its blog post in February that it wants to focus its efforts on the mobile platforms that vast majority of people use.
It said about 70 per cent of the phones sold at that time had operating systems run by BlackBerry and Nokia, but only two Nokia models — S40, S60 — will be affected.
Now, mobile operating systems run by Google, Apple and Microsoft account for 99.5 per cent of sales.
The top mobile messaging apps covered by IHS reached a combined active user base of approximately 4.2 billion monthly users by the end of 2015. This is up 38 per cent from the 3.1 billion achieved in 2014.
Funding value
The combined user base of the top messaging apps increased by over one billion between 2014 and 2015.
Investor interest in social and communications apps slowed down in 2015, the total disclosed funding value for social and communications apps decreased by 7.15 per cent on a year-over-year basis.
However, Woo said that the overall growth rate is slowing as the market matures.
He said that both Facebook and Tencent have grown their lead over other messaging apps since 2011.
Moreover, Facebook Messenger is starting to match WeChat as a platform for services beyond messaging by introducing features such as payments, video calling and transportation into its app.
“Snapchat is innovating to attract the strong youth audience. Instead of driving incremental revenues through paid features, Snapchat will focus on advertising, including sponsored lenses and branded content,” he said.
South Korea’s KakaoTalk is struggling to increase its number of monthly active users and international expansion remains challenging. Domestic dominance has not translated to international success.