Zalo attracts 2 million Myanmar users after four months of operation

This is the first time a Vietnamese OTT application has expanded its market internationally.

To start business in Myanmar, an emerging market with 52 million residents, Zalo engineers had to travel very often between Vietnam and Myanmar to find out local consumer habits as well as invest in infrastructure.

In Myanmar, technology has been developing but infrastructure has not been able to meet demand because of poor internet coverage and cheap, weak smartphones.

To cope with the situation, Zalo has located its servers in Myanmar and maximised its product so that it can run well in popular mobile devices.

Zalo has started to become popular thanks to its quick connection, stability and local language support.

“We are not sure about our success in one new international market because it has been such a short time but based on our success in Việt Nam, we will try our best,” Vương Quang Khải, VNG deputy director who founded Zalo, was quoted as saying in the Đầu Tư (Việt Nam Investment Review) newspaper.

Khải revealed four factors that are Zalo’s advantages to survive and develop strong international technology. They are: good human resources; Vietnamese intelligence to reach a world-class level; the internet has continuously changed and Zalo staff have refreshed themselves very often with new ideas and must be ready to learn different aspects; and most of Zalo staff are young people, a strength to develop in the internet market.

Zalo was unveiled in late 2012 as an OTT application on mobile devices and by September 2016, it has had 60 million users with 32 million of them frequent users. It has changed from an OTT application for connection through internet to services.

At present, Zalo is assessed by financial experts to be worth US$900 million.