With 150 Million Users, Chat App Nimbuzz Dominates India and Middle East

Founded in 2006 by Evert Jaap Lugt in Rotterdam, Nimbuzz has come a long way to its current product offering, a messaging application that is accessible on the web and mobile. Today, the India-based company which is backed by Mangrove Capital Partners and Naspers Group has more than 150 million users worldwide. While the eastern part of Asia fancy mobile messaging apps like Line, WeChat, and KakaoTalk, India and the Middle East prefer Nimbuzz.

To maintain high user engagement in India, Nimbuzz has partnerships with brands in India to contribute content based on local interests. In the Middle East, Nimbuzz has enabled local language scripts which allow users to communicate in the language most convenient to them including Arabic.

Nimbuzz doesn’t have cutesy stickers for users but it does have chat buddies which are extensions of the app that allows users to play games, receive jokes, news, and even prepare for the graduate record examinations (GRE). The same chat buddy extensions are also used by brands to communicate directly with Nimbuzz users. It has N-World, its own digital store that offers applications, avatars, games, and digital gifts; the store sees more than 500,000 transactions per month. Users will have to purchase the app’s own currency called Nimbuckz to buy virtual items on Nimbuzz.

The strategy that Nimbuzz undertakes to scale is also vastly different from its counterparts like KakaoTalk, WeChat, and Line which usually splash big ad dollars on TV commercials and online advertising. Instead, CEO Vikas Saxena told me, Nimbuzz works directly with major mobile telcos for distribution and also for easy Nimbuckz billing. Nimbuckz can either be bought through a credit card or direct operator billing.

The company believes that app-telco partnerships will drive the future of the messaging industry across the world. To date, Nimbuzz has existing partnerships with telcos in India, Pakistan, and Southeast Asia and will be using the same strategy for other countries. Besides monetizing from its N-World and charging for VOIP calls, Nimbuzz also generates a large chunk of its revenue from advertisers including Hyundai, Perfetti, Reebok, and Nokia.

Out of 150 million users, 37 million of them are from the Middle East, 41 million from the rest of Asia, and nine million in the US. Nimbuzz is also seeing 210,000 new registrations per day.