Zalo beat WhatsApp in Vietnam. It now wants to be the country’s top super app

Three and a half billion. That’s the number of Covid-19-related messages that Vietnam’s Ministry of Health had sent to residents through Zalo these past few months. The local messaging app served the authorities’ efforts to spread and amplify its health campaign across the country.

For years, the government has been appealing to the tech community to build local platforms that can be competitive enough to reduce reliance on international ones.

Success so far has been fleeting: Local platforms have poor track records compared to their deeper-pocketed international rivals, with the likes of Grab and Sea dominating the country’s ride-hailing and ecommerce sectors.

VNG Campus is located in District 7, Ho Chi Minh City./Photo credit: VNG

But with about 52 million monthly active users, Zalo is the exception: It has edged out Viber, WhatsApp, and even Facebook Messenger in Vietnam.

A product of VNG, Vietnam’s first tech unicorn, Zalo has been around for nearly a decade, enjoying superb popularity in the country much like Line does in Japan, KakaoTalk in South Korea, and WeChat in China. 

Back in 2013, Tech in Asia put Zalo on its list of the 11 most innovative messaging apps from Asia; it had about 500,000 users at the time. Over the years, the app has been adding other services to its social messaging function, quietly becoming a hidden contender in Vietnam’s super-app battle.

How it beat Facebook-owned WhatsApp

In Vietnam, people often ask friends or contacts to add them on Zalo. The name is a combination of Zing, which refers to a range of VNG products (Zing MP3, Zing News, ZingPlay), and Alo, which is how Vietnamese say “hello” when picking up a call.

Zalo was created by Vuong Quang Khai, VNG’s current executive vice president. In an interview with the South China Morning Post back in 2017, Khai stressed that it was “an uphill battle” for Zalo “because in early 2013, WeChat had a million users already [in Vietnam] and Line was very strong.”

“We needed to select our own advantages and play to our environment. It was our only chance to survive,” he said.

Khai declined to be interviewed for this story. However, he did speak to Tech in Asia in 2013 when Zalo just got started, and he noted then the importance of going mobile-first.

“If you look at all of our VNG branding before, it [was] Zing MP3, Zing Me, Zing Game, etc. We always featured the full word Zing [prominently]. Zing is associated with web services, so Zalo is a step away from that,” Khai said at the time. The move echoed how Tencent had launched WeChat as a mobile app, even while it was running the desktop-focused QQ.

Since then, Zalo has not just survived but also thrived.

But did Zalo move too slowly?