World Cup boosts Viber expansion in Brazil
Communications app Viber has seen a surge in the volume in calls and messages during the World Cup, with a 1,000 percent increase in calls made from Brazil and a 40 percent uplift in messages.
The stats refer to the first 10 days of the competition. According to the company, more than 90 percent of the traffic went through open Wi-fi networks at hotels, cafés, restaurants and stadia and peaked during the games.
Earlier this year, the company started a marketing effort to take on WhatsApp - which has over 40 million users in Brazil - whereby it enabled calls to fixed-line numbers at no cost.
At the time, the company said the main goal of the offer was to increase the number of messages exchanged through the platform in the country by 25 percent. This has been achieved, according to the company.
The Viber app has registered 40 million free calls made during their promotion in Brazil, which lasted just over two months. The company's growth during that period jumped from 10 million users to 16 million users.
The 60 percent increase Viber has seen as a result of its latest marketing push is nearly double the annual growth of the company in recent years in Brazil, estimated to be about 3.3 million new users.
Mobile traffic in Brazil will see a hefty 11-fold increase between 2013 and 2018, reaching 440 petabytes per month by the end of the period, according to a recent study carried out by Cisco.