Myanmar is a country that is still off the map for most investors and startups. It's considered to be years behind Cambodia, which is in turn, years behind Vietnam, which is behind Thailand. And everyone is behind Indonesia in interest level. The numbers in Myanmar reveal the reason. In a population of 60 million people, below five million are online.
At the same time, Myanmar looks poised to explode. Foreign telcos have successfully bid on Myanmar's telecommunications lines and are getting their licenses in September. That's good news for a country that sells SIM cards for over US$200. In some cases, when the junta was in power, a SIM card would cost over US$1,000. With foreign telcos coming in, the price will drop to $2. This is exactly why people are betting on Myanmar's explosion.
MyChat seeks to hit Myanmar at just the right moment
This is where MyChat, a product from the company MySquar, comes in. MySquar, as we've written before, is a content-based social network that aims to be the center of Myanmar's social media, gaming, and now messaging world. In many ways, you could look at MySquar as an attempt to replicate the VNG model in Myanmar. It wants to develop a social platform that can deliver content (mainly games) to its users. Thus, just as VNG invests into Zalo as its main mobile platform of the future, MySquar is investing into MyChat, which it believes is the future of a Myanmar about to explode with mobile users (and leapfrog past broadband connections).
See: Squar, Myanmar's First Homegrown Social Network Wants to Beat Facebook
Last month, Viber claimed it has over five million users in Myanmar. That means MyChat is up against a beast that is apparently beating Facebook as a social network – though there's reason to distrust Viber's numbers given that Myanmar Posts and Telecommunications reported the country's mobile internet penetration to be 2.6 million users back in May.
MyChat's numbers
With fewer resources than Viber, MyChat has made a strong start. According to the company:
Within its first two weeks of availability, MyChat has already topped the charts, and on September 10, 2014, MyChat was the top free new app download on Google Play, and number four of all free downloads in Myanmar. Users are praising MyChat as well, with over 300 user reviews to date and an average user rating of 4.5 stars out of 5. Within the first week of the app's availability, over 70,000 friend requests were sent.
MySquar says the app continued to see growth since the first two weeks and is optimistic about further growth as it goes up against Viber and Facebook Messenger.
Winning in Myanmar with Huawei in the way
One little known tidbit about Myanmar: according to MySquar representatives, Myanmar is dominated by Huawei phones. And if you know Chinese companies, you've guessed already that Huawei doesn't use the Google Play Store in Myanmar. For the other phones that sell in Myanmar, users are also stuck with the app stores that are native to that device. Devices are rooted for the Burmese keyboard, making it hard for novice users to get another app store. After Huawei, there's Samsung, LG, and then Lenovo. There's therefore no dominant app store and users must download the Android apk file to get apps that are not on specific app stores. One of the more common stores is 1mobile. For those without an app store option, there's Zapya, which is most comonly used to transfer apps to phones. That presents an interesting predicament for MySquar, which asks you to jump over to its website to get the software for MyChat. That's true for its two other signature products as well: MySocial, the content-based social platform, and MyStore, the third party app store with mostly games. Both of these apps are delivered via the MySquar website with an Android apk.
All of this presents an interesting predicament for the MyChat app, which must market, advertise, and grow via word of mouth, Facebook, and its own MySocial platform. For reference, Facebook in Myanmar, as of 2013, had just over one million users. It is likely this number has doubled or tripled, given recent mobile usage growth (58 percent of mobile users use Facebook. MySocial competes with Facebook on the social media front and with Messenger on the MyChat front. But the apps key advantages are that they are tailored specifically to Myanmar. MyStore hosts word games that only Burmese people can play and MyChat features stickers of famous local celebrities and characters. The battle has just begun but it's likely that MySquar's local focus will win out in the end. After all, Facebook and Google are barely even looking at the nascent country.
Editing by Paul Bischoff
Have Your Say!
http://www.information.myanmaronlinecentre.com/mychat-a-chat-app-to-conquer-myanmar/
No comments:
Post a Comment