Last week was a busy week in which three messaging app companies held events almost concurrently. The apps were KakaoTalk, Line, and WeChat, al of which are Asian-made messaging applications. KakaoTalk is the most popular messaging app in South Korea (88% market share) Line is big in Japan (44% share) and WeChat with a significant user base in China.

A number of players in this segment such as WhatsApp tend to remain quiet and relaxed compared to its Asian competitors, maybe because at the moment WhatsApp can be considered the biggest player next to BlackBerry Messenger in major Indonesian cities. A number of companies such as Samsung, Nokia, Facebook, and Microsoft already have their own messaging app products, all of which hanging on to the fact that Indonesians love chatting, especially through mobile.

The fact remains, of all these players in this segment, there’s a good chance that only one or two will survive with a significant market share in Indonesia. The million dollar question then is, how can players in this field grab market share in Indonesia?

“The speed of the app and the competence in message delivery”, say Aria Rajasa (Tees Indonesia) and Api Perdana (NgaturDuit) when asked about this matter. These apps were made with the Internet speeds of their respective countries in mind when they were built, which when applied to Indonesia, becomes ineffective. Some of these apps tend to be bandwidth hogs with all the emoticons and other Internet-reliant features. This causes a bottleneck on data access and the apps become slow.

Agus Mulyono, founder of Kartunama.net has a different view. According to Mulyono, players in this segment have to ensure that their apps are on every available platform from high end to the low end. “The next step is to work together with smartphone makers ti ensure the apps are built in to their phones”.

Another opinion came from Dondy Bappedyanto (Infinys System Indonesia), “target markets that are using low cost mobile phones, focusing on the low end”. According to Bappedyanto there aren’t as many players in this segment and keeping in mind that the scale of the market is much larger than the high end.

Aside from speed of applications themselves, speed to market also plays an important factor in this fast-paced competition. There is a greater chance of winning the market if the player enters the market before its competitors and of course factoring the app’s ease of use and friendliness. This competition is similar to that of the telecommunications industry in which everyone moves very rapidly to churn innovative products ahead of the others.

There is one more thing that I think is important for messaging application to win the competition: Partnership. Collaborating and partnering with content owners and distributors seem to be crucial at this stage especially for these messing apps who came from overseas. Content owners, communities, telco companies, mobile phone producers, are among this who should be approached when looking at expanding the market to Indonesia. Of course it doesn’t stop there, and it doesn’t just work, because partnering with the wrong people may end up missing the target.

This year though it’s definitely an exciting and a tough one for messaging outfits like Kakao, Line, WeChat, and WhatsApp. Which will win? Time will tell.

While we wait, why don’t you vote for the messaging app you think will win in Indonesia. We will publish the results of this poll in the near future.