This morning The Jakarta Post published a story based on an interview with WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum and vice president of business Neeraj Arora conducted over email. Having had our own interview with Arora last year, this morning’s story on seems quite familiar and even some of the statements sounded like they’ve been made before with some added references to more recent developments. The big story from the interview seems to be a claim attributed to Arora that WhatsApp handles 27 billion messages in and out of Indonesia. That number sounded very familiar to us.
Indeed, our sister site Trenologi on 14 June wrote about the 27 billion messages exchanged over WhatsApp. It was also covered by our friends on The Next Web as well as other major technology news outlets. After all, the company posted that announcement quietly to its Twitter account on 13 June.
new daily record: 10B+ msgs sent (inbound) and 17B+ msgs received (outbound) by our users = 27 Billion msgs handled in just 24 hours!
— WhatsApp Inc. (@WhatsApp) June 12, 2013
There was no direct quote regarding the number cited by The Post, but given the tweet by WhatsApp, it seems that the writer may have misunderstood what was said even though earlier in the piece she mentioned that the company does not give out detailed country-by-country breakdown.
Indonesian netizens are without a doubt a very social group, one that will quickly identify, eliminate, and adopt various communication platforms. Natural selection for the winning platforms occur very rapidly among Indonesians as we tend to stick to our service of choice for quite some time. None last forever but any change in preference will occur quite quickly once a more preferable service had been identified, so for WhatsApp to be bullish on Indonesia, it is something that is to be expected.
WhatsApp has always been a mostly quiet company. Any statements made to the media have been controlled, mostly low profile, generally understated but with positive forward looking statements with encouraging undertones. The company hardly ever gives a media interview unless there’s a message that they want to convey specifically.
It is certainly not a surprise reading the statements that they gave to The Jakarta Post. Our own story on WhatsApp back in October discussed the market for messaging applications, the increasing dominance of Asian apps, the popularity of stickers and games, as well as the emergence of messaging apps as more encompassing mobile platforms as threats to WhatsApp.
WhatsApp is currently the number one free app on Google Play and the number one paid app on the App Store. The company had been seen as falling behind its Asian competitors for not adopting their strategy of turning a messaging app into a platform on which people can play games and conduct trade.
Back in 2012 Arora had indicated to us that WhatsApp is very interested in doing something more for the Indonesian market due to the popularity of the app and the frequency of which Indonesians exchange messages through WhatsApp. As always, he did not provide specific numbers for Indonesia but he highlighted the efforts to translate the app into Indonesian. To The Jakarta Post Arora said, “Indonesia is a very social market”, its people apparently are “more chatty than those in other countries”.
WhatsApp on iOS has always been a paid app, one that costs Rp 9500 on the Indonesian App Store and US$ 0.99 on the US App Store, with the rare free download periods, but on Android and BlackBerry, the app is a free download. “We also want to make sure that good payment systems exist first, either through carrier billing or credit card payments, before charging”, explained Arora to The Jakarta Post.
The company has data bundling deals with the majority of Indonesian mobile telcos and we expect them to have some sort of a revenue sharing agreement in place but Axis chief of marketing Daniel Horan told us that they don’t disclose their deals with partners and this policy clearly applies to other telcos as well.
WhatsApp had been rumored to be in talks with Google and Facebook for acquisitions but nothing had came out of them, with the company denying both rumors.
Earlier this year in April at the D: Dive Into Mobile conference held by US tech site AllThingsD, Koum said on stage that even though the company is now bigger than Twitter in terms of active members, he wants WhatsApp to focus on delivering a single monetization strategy in bringing its messaging product, echoing the statement that Arora said to us in 2012.
There are plenty of successful businesses that don’t use advertising, Koum observed. Gas. Water. “We want to be one of them. … Our monetization strategy is simple. One dollar a year. If we did something besides that, it would just get in the way. … We want a great product and great user experience.”
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