Neeraj Arora, had recently mentioned that the service has crossed 25 million monthly active users in India, up from 20 million in August 2013. This is still significantly (and surprisingly) smaller than the 84 million users (including Internet) that Facebook claims for the country. There still does appear to be a gap between the two, even on mobile: for Idea Cellular, for example, 15.6 million connections (not users) accessed Facebook from their mobile phone in the quarter ended September 30th 2013, while around 4.3 million accessed WhatsApp. Deals like the Tata Docomo one are essential for WhatsApp to grow their active user base.
Telecom operators are in a tricky position: they need services like WhatsApp to grow their data business, but some, like Idea Cellular, are still seeing it as a threat to SMS. Idea Cellular MD Himanshu Kampania had recently warned about the shift from SMS to WhatsApp and other messaging services, saying that while only around 36% of Idea’s connection base uses SMS, many high-usage SMS customers have shifted to Internet based messaging services.
No comments:
Post a Comment