Viber: Good vibes about Malaysian market

MALAYSIANS can look forward to more localised services from cross platform instant messaging service Viber in the near future. 

“We recently set up offices in Vietnam and the Philippines, and are certainly considering local activities within Malaysia as we believe it’s an important market for Viber,” Talmon Marco, chief executive officer of Viber Media Inc said in a recent e-mail interview with Bytz. 

He is pretty upbeat about the prospects of growth in Viber’s user base within the Malaysian market. 

“The consumption of the average smartphone user is higher (here) than in other countries within the area and the smartphone penetration is already above 60% and growing rapidly,” Marco adds. 

However, he is aware that each South-East Asian nation is unique in its own ways and these differences need to be kept in mind when reaching out to each locality. 

“Trying to put all the people in South-East Asia in one bucket is overly simplistic. Each country has its own rich history, culture and habits. We’re doing our best to cater to the individual needs of each of these markets.” 

Making the brand stick 

As part of the company’s efforts to improve the user's experience on Viber, it has released the Viber Out feature which allows users to call others who are not on Viber via low cost calls on landlines and mobile phones. 

Besides that, Viber also now boasts a sticker market and push to talk features. 

“Both features have increased the number of messages users send in Viber: more users, more messages per user and we can see the growth globally,” Marco claims. 

He does not, however, view the popularity of stickers amongst users as solely an Asian phenomenon. 

“We believe that communicating in a more visual way is a universal desire,” he says. 

To date, Viber has gained the most traction on the Android platform, but Marco feels that this shouldn’t come as a surprise at all since the operating system is presently a favourite amongst users worldwide. 

In addition to its commitment to ensure that every features it adds to the Viber app is “well thought of and well executed”, Marco shares that the company also differentiates itself from its competitors through its security and privacy policies. He says the company has consistently refused to allow governments to access to the content of messages or calls made via Viber. 

“We never developed the ability to collect this information and we have no intention to do that,” Marco says. 

He refers to the incident in March last year where the Saudi Arabian government had demanded that messaging apps like Viber, WhatsApp and Skype allow them to eavesdrop on conversations made through those apps, threatening a ban on companies that did not comply. 

“Viber was the only one to get banned, as we disagreed with this demand. I think our users, everywhere, whether in Saudi Arabia or Malaysia should appreciate the fact that the Saudi government is not tapping into their conversations... It’s a shame we are one of the only companies in our space (if not the only) that feel this way,” Marco says. 

For more information about Viber, visit www.viber.com.