KakaoTalk

Company

Kakao is a South Korea based company founded in late 2006 that is recognized for KakaoTalk, one of the most popular mobile chat apps in Asia. It has built an ecosystem of apps around KakaoTalk, giving users the ability to access a variety of services with one Kakao account. The company’s other products include:

• KakaoStory, an Instagram-like photo sharing social network,
• KakaoLink, an API that lets phone users sent links to friends on KakaoTalk, and
• Kakao Game, a platform for game developers to publish their games on KakaoTalk, and Kakao members to play games with one another.
• Kakao Page, a content and media publishing platform that pays content creators.

As of May 2012, the company is valuated at about USD 454M. In December the same year, it reached a staff strength of 280, up from 14 exactly 3 years ago.

Kakao has more products in the pipeline for 2013. That includes Story Plus, a marketing platform based on Kakao Story, Chatting Plus, which enhances KakaoTalk with third-party apps like maps and music players, and KakaoPage, a micropublishing platform that enables authors to monetize their content. A PC version of KakaoTalk has also been planned.

KakaoTalk

Launched in March 2010, KakaoTalk has around 70M registered users and 27M daily unique visitors as of December 2012. It has achieved a dominant position among mobile messaging apps in South Korea, with a 95% penetration rate of smartphones in the country. KakaoTalk goes beyond being a simple messaging app, offering free calls, customizable themes, an integrated apps and games platform, and premium content. It monetizes by:

• offering brands the ability to add Kakao users as its friends, which become a means to communicate its messages,
• selling branded premium content like emoticon, stickers, as well as online gifts that users can buy and send to friends. Revenue is shared between brands and Kakao. It was reported in 2011 that the gift feature had, on a monthly basis, generated about 10,000 transactions and KRW 2B (USD 1.88M) in revenue.

Other notable facts:

• Average weekly usage of 302 minutes in November 2012, up from 175 minutes in July 2012, around the time it launched Kakao Game
• Support for 13 languages: English, Korean, Japanese, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Indonesian, Thai, Turkish, Vietnamese.
• Support for 5 smartphone platforms: Android, iPhone, Samsung Apps, Blackberry, Windows Phone