Value Not Added?
According to market research firm Nielsen Korea, the number of users of the mobile Android applications provided by Daum Kakao is on the decline in more than half of its 10 applications.
Fortunately for the company, though, the monthly average number of users increased from 24,470,124 to 28,950,634 for Kakao Talk messenger between March last year and March this year. Likewise, those of Kakao Music went up from 2,655,566 to 3,799,653, and for Kakao Pay from 335,523 to 1,706,513 during the same period, respectively.
However, Daum Kakao is showing poor performance when it comes to the other applications. For example, the number plummeted from 147,299 to 42,770 for the picture messenger application Zap during the three months since its debut in January this year.
Those released in the second half of last year are failing to show signs of recovery, too. The number of users of the shopping application Kakao Pick dropped from over 1 million to 891,857, and then to 620,815 in the first three months of 2015. That of the Bank Wallet Kakao for mobile remittances shrunk more than 50 percent, from 1,171,394 to 572,336 between November 2014 and March 2015. The news application of Kakao Topic was used by no more than 191,743 people last month, and Kakao Agit provided closed communities to only 55,944 users in the same month.
In the meantime, Kakao Story and Kakao Group showed slight declines, with their rivals increasing their presence at a rapid pace. The monthly average numbers of users of the two fell by approximately 400,000 each from a year earlier, reaching 18,217,611 and 3,479,402. During the period, Naver Band increased the number of its users from about 13 million to 15,780,849.