BlackBerry Ltd (NASDAQ:BBRY) (TSE:BB) is hugely popular in Indonesia, and now a study by market research firm Nielsen concluded that Indonesians also love the BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) chat application, according to The Jakarta Post. The Nielsen study concludes that Indonesians love chatting and almost 80% use BBM for chats. This is certainly a massive fan base considering the rise of the other popular chat apps like WhatsApp, LINE and KakaoTalk.
BBM provides emotional connect
According to Anil Antony, the executive director of consumer insights at Nielsen Indonesia, almost 79% of the smartphone users use BlackBerry Ltd (NASDAQ:BBRY) (TSE:BB)’s BBM for an average of around 23 minutes a day. Other chat apps like WhatsApp and LINE are used by 57% and 30% of smartphone users, but for only six minutes and five minutes a day, respectively. The executives believe that BBM provides emotional benefits to the users.
“WhatsApp and other chat applications have a minimum engagement to replace BBM. People already have their own family groups, student-teacher groups and other groups on BBM, so they don’t want to not be in those conversations,” he said.
Regarding the time spent, the Nielsen study revealed that 71% of the smartphone users spend 26% or 37 minutes a day of their “smartphone-time”, on various chat applications. Whats interesting is that the time spent on chatting is more than the share of browsing the Internet and using entertainment features; 33 minutes and 27 minutes, respectively. Another amazing fact is the calls and messaging accounted for a minute portion of the total time, i.e. only six minutes and eight minutes per day, respectively.
BlackBerry preferred by Indonesians
The study supports the idea that Indonesians prefer BlackBerry Ltd (NASDAQ:BBRY) (TSE:BB) handsets. Despite this, the market share of the Canadian firm has been sliding in the country from 43% in 2011 to 13.54% last year, as per the International Data Corporation (IDC) Indonesia. According to the Nielsen study, 48% of Indonesian phone users had BlackBerry phones and BlackBerry is the favorite brand for 34% of the users.
Indonesia has recently emerged as a hot spot for the smartphone makers. According to Indonesian Internet Service Providers Association (APJII), the number of mobile data subscriptions in the country is expected to more than double to 125 million in 2017 compared to around 60 million last year. Indonesia has a population of over 240 million people.
