SEAsia Messaging App Share

 

LOTS of opportunities in SEAsia.
To recap on LINE:

• 60% of LINE’s revenue came from the mobile games
• LINE was the world’s top app publisher by monthly revenue
• LINE Posts $143 Million In Revenue, Up 123% Year-Over-Year
• $1.5mm USD revenue for user generated sticker marketplace

Granted, we may not see the same sorts of revenues from SEAsian countries, as most are developing nations and notorious for not spending (ex Path is Indonesia’s largest market, yet they never boast revenues or lack thereof).

The next few years will be fun to watch as chat apps mature and become more dominant.
(Sources 1,2,3, image via here)

 

43.3% of Japanese use LINE Professionally, 29.6% use Facebook

 

Wow — I knew messaging apps are huge in Japan but it still astounds me to see numbers.
43.3% of those in the sample pool use LINE professionally.
29.6% use Facebook as a professional communication tool.

Skype is 12%
KakaoTalk 6.1%
Followed by LinkedIn, Viber, communicator.

I guess as Hiroko Tabuchi of the NYT reported: “It’s just easier when a bear says it.”
*above stats provided by MMD — a Mobile Marketing Data Labo, a research company in Japan.

Charts: Global Internet usage

I had to blog this vs tweeting  — it’s just too good not to share.
Take a look:

• 20% of Europeans have never used the Internet.
• 34% of Italians have never used the Internet — via qz

Granted, there are still 13% of American adults in 2014 don’t use the Internet [1] but these numbers still astound me.

Then there is Asia — and I loathe using ‘Asia’ so loosely because Asia is BIG — but they are the global leader in online growth: 42% APAC vs 27% Europe — Comscore Asia forecast (PDF)

This is also a good opportunity to revisit the scope of technological adoption and revenues coming out of Asia.
Parallel with online growth; the increase of mobile traffic, combined with mobile revenues makes this region, the most interesting when it comes to disruptive technologies + monetization.

 

Asia includes the following four countries: China, India, Japan and South Korea. Those four countries account for 66% of Asia’s population, 60% of Asia’s mobile connections and over 70% of regional mobile income. Four markets, four countries with four very different ecosystems.

China = population of 1.4 billion people, GDP of 8.2 trillion USD
India = population of 1.2 billion people, GDP of 1.84 trillion USD
South Korea = population of 50M people, GDP of 1.13 trillion USD
Japan = population of 127.6M people, GDP of 5.96 trillion USD

Then, there are the smaller countries with high GDPs and/or high population like: Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, etc., etc.

To put that into perspective, the US has a population of 314M people (double Japan) with a GDP of 15.68 trillion USD. Compared to the big four Asian countries (Japan, South Korea, India and China), the US has been ahead of the race as far as development, access and economic distribution. This development gap the US has, is significantly wider with India and China than the gap the US has with Japan and South Korea, but the US is still ahead of these four countries.

WSJ just reported China is projected to overtake the US in mobile revenue [2] but as I said here, Japan should be the market to pay attention to, as

1. smartphone penetration is still low
2. spend is high — and keeps growing

Looking at global run rates and stats, it’s all about Asia and realistically, which markets and ecosystems one can penetrate.