App Annie taps into mobile boom in India and Southeast Asia with new Singapore office

After receiving US$55 million in investment at the start of the year, App Annie is not short on funds. Today the Sino-US startup revealed where some of the money is being pledged – in a new Singapore office.

“First and foremost, it’s Southeast Asia and India,” says Oliver Lo, App Annie’s EVP of marketing, about the main target of the new Singapore base. That’s where some of the biggest growth in smartphone adoption is happening right now, and Oliver says that means the firm needs to get closer to its clients – app developers – in those high growth nations. “We basically go where the app market goes,” he tells Tech in Asia.

“India is now, according to our data, the fifth largest country by downloads across iOS and Google Play,” Lo says. “Southeast Asia – they’re growing fast; their app revenues year-over-year grew 77 percent from January 2014 to 2015.” Indonesia and Vietnam are now the fastest-growing nations in Asia in terms of how much app developers can make from smartphone users.

The top four countries by app revenues – the US, Japan, China, South Korea – are already covered by some of App Annie’s nine other offices. The new home in Singapore, the tenth office, is designed to look ahead to the not-too-distant future of well over a billion smartphone users across India and Southeast Asia. “Those two markets are relatively untapped compared to other markets. We see a lot of big companies going into these regions and we see a lot of startups getting big funding rounds. So all those companies need data,” adds Lo.

Another reason for choosing Singapore, Lo explains, is the local and international tech talent in the island-state. The office will be up and running some time in April.

As well as covering India and Southeast Asia, App Annie’s new Singapore crew also covers app developers in Australia and New Zealand.

The next billion

“If you think about population, this office represents the largest total population,” Lo (pictured) says. That’s a lot of ground for its initial staff of 10 people to cover. He goes on:

When you divide that by smartphone penetration, the number is still probably up there as one of the largest. Then divide that by ARPU [average revenue per user] and monetization. In this region, the ARPU and monetization isn’t as high as Japan, China, and South Korea, but that’s because the infrastructure’s not there, the ecosystem is still early, the companies are still developing. […] This potentially could, as the space develops, compete with those guys in the natural order of the app market.

Tech titans like Apple, Twitter, and Facebook concur, with all of them opening bases in Indonesia in the past year. Twitter’s Jakarta nest opened just last week.