China-based messaging platform WeChat perceives Indonesia as a potential market. Within its attempts to engage the Indonesian market, this app developed by Tencent targets to attract more clients in the enterprise sector.
WeChat’s interest towards Indonesian market is stated directly by Tencent’s Business Development Director Benny Ho. He stated that Indonesia is one of most potential markets outside China.
“Indonesia is one of most important markets outside China, considering the fact that the market is very huge, the smartphone penetration is quite low and the growth is considerably high,” Ho stated.
He explained that the low smartphone penetration offers a vast opportunity for WeChat to gain more users in Indonesia, a country in which the citizens put online interaction as one of their favorites.
A couple of months ago, Pew published a survey stating that in Indonesia, there are only 24 percent of the people accessing internet, and only 15 percent using smartphone. It was the lowest percentage among other Southeast Asian countries. And this is what WeChat perceives as an opportunity.
To attract more users in Indonesia, WeChat plans on engaging customers from the enterprise sector who need a communication platform and marketing channel. As Ho stated, WeChat’s main focus in Indonesia this year is to ensure more companies to optimize their business performance using WeChat’s features.
Furthermore, WeChat has also partnered with a number of prominent e-commerce players in Indonesia like Lazada, Zalora, and Elevenia, as reported by the Jakarta Post.
WeChat’s plan of gaining more users in Indonesia means it has to be ready to fight against other messaging services such as LINE and BBM.
In the business sector, LINE has released a new feature called LINE@, a feature which enables sellers to promote their products in form of text, image or sticker. BBM also owns a flagship for business called BBM meetings, a feature that enables users to have a video conference with other 24 people top.
Being aware of the strict competition, WeChat has prepared an ammo to face the competitors. Ho claimed that WeChat will serve 1GB cloud storage and free file transfer to net more users.
