Indonesian Hot Battleground for Mobile Messaging

Satwika Movementi, 27, has been benefitting from mobile messaging applications for years to not only stay in touch with friends and family, but also to help her ease the flow of communications with her office colleagues.

“I have been using BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) and WhatsApp so far. I use them more than I use old-school social networks,” she said, adding that the messaging services were also important to support her work in the media industry.

Just like Satwika, many other young Indonesians in their productive ages are running messaging applications on their smartphones to support their activities.

The situation, coupled with the growing number of smartphone users in the country, would become a golden opportunity for message-service providers, said Indonesia ICT Institute founder Heru Sutadi.

Early last month, the Finnish mobile messaging service Jongla, which charges for its services, made its debut in Indonesia by partnering with the country’s second-largest cellular operator, PT XL Axiata. Jongla has set an ambitious target to become one of the country’s top-three mobile messengers next year.

“We are convinced that Indonesia will be our biggest market […] and we are targeting being in the top three instant messaging providers [in the country] by end of next year,” said Jongla CEO Riku Salminen.

He said that the country would become Jongla’s largest market by end of this year or next year as the number of Indonesian smartphone users was surging because of youngsters who were willing to try new things.

The number of smartphone users in the country is forecast to hit 103.6 million people in 2017 from around 61.2 million people this year, according to market research company eMarketer.

Meanwhile, an existing mobile messaging provider, BBM, has developed its service to stand out from the competition.

Focusing more on the enterprise market, BlackBerry has launched BBM Meetings, a service that allows voice and video conferences for groups of about 25 people.

BlackBerry’s president for global enterprise solutions, John Sims, told The Jakarta Post previously that his firm would make the service available to the consumer market next year.

“It will have a presence on BlackBerry devices, iOS and Android. It will be on tablets and we will also have a desktop version,” he said.

According to a Nielsen’s study published in June, BBM was still the favorite messaging application in the country, with 79 percent of Indonesian smartphone users using the application for about 23 minutes a day.

The figure surpassed those of WhatsApp and Line, which have only 57 and 30 percent of smartphone users using their services for six and five minutes a day, respectively.

A recent study — which excluded BBM — published by London-based research firm Global WebIndex, meanwhile, found that WhatsApp topped mobile messaging in the country, with 34 percent of Internet subscribers running the application.

Following behind were Facebook Messenger, WeChat and Skype, with 28 percent, 18 percent and 18 percent, respectively.

Global WebIndex’s head of trends, Jason Mander, said that while certain messaging applications topped the market, the competition ahead would be tougher, with most users opting for free messaging services.

XL Axiata Axis Capital Group Jakarta PT Telecom News