It’s been four years since the Hike Messenger app was launched. After receiving $175 million in Series D financing from Tencent – that runs China’s popular messaging app WeChat – and Taiwan’s Foxconn, Hike is India’s newest Unicorn valued at $1.4 billion. It offers news, games, cricket scores and content apart from messaging. With this round, total funding in Hike has risen to $260 million. Kavin Bharti Mittal, founder and CEO, Hike spoke to FEs Anup Jayaram & Anushree Bhattacharyya on the way forward. Excerpts:
What does the entry of Tencent mean?
It’s capital first followed by everything else. We have a very strong road map over the next two years, based on which Tencent has invested. It includes areas where we think Tencent can help us. Those discussions will start in the next couple of months. Tencent is investing in the team, the product and the company. However, there were no talks about synergies between Hike and WeChat which is a very small app in India.
What does Foxconn bring to the table?
Foxconn has a very strong software side to its business, especially on Android. While we have experts at our office, people undervalue exposure and experience. Both Tencent and Foxconn operate at such a large scale that the firms know the software business like the back of their hand. The knowledge gathered from these companies will help improve our products and services.
How do you plan to monetize Hike?
For the next couple of years we are not going to focus on monetisation. It is not about a single user transacting but about users transacting between themselves and driving this engagement is important. While in the West, companies earn from advertising, in the East Internet firms earn from transaction such as in-app purchases. Messaging apps such as Line earn from stickers and branded channels. So there are many business models. I can’t say which one I’ll opt because the product will change in two years from now. Once we have critical mass engagement, then we can take our eyes off the product and focus on earning revenue.
How do you see Hike competing with WhatsApp?
We don’t compete with WhatsApp. Our data over the last six months shows that people use multiple messaging apps. They use different apps for different purposes and to communicate with different people. We are more than just a messaging platform. We have Hike News where people browse through 1.5 billion stories per month on the platform. We have cricket scores, besides bit size high quality social games such as Word Rush. We also have something called, Just for Laughs, it serves you jokes everyday. People want content delivered to them and we have already started adding it. We would like to enable brands that are very close to Hike in terms of target group and positioning to deploy exclusive content on the platform.
Why do you believe India is a sight and sound market?
The reason why we’re hitting the ceiling at 200 million Internet users is the gap between desirability and affordability. While people don’t understand English and the written language, on a call or visual medium people can recognise everything. In 4-5 five years texting will take a back seat as communication will be audio-visual.
What’s your position on net neutrality?
I think we are still not clear on what’s happening on differential pricing. I am glad that Trai has taken up the topic and is seeking recommendations. It seems the industry is pointing towards a direction where telcos can’t choose, which is what we also want. We need to build an open data platform where OTT players if they decide can spend money to buy data and give some part of their services free to users. So instead of spending money on marketing and advertising, one may end up buying data from a telco agnostic platform.
