Huawei, the leading global technology company, announced it is expanding its long-term brand cooperation with Viber following a successful consumer response to the company’s international call and messaging app on AppGallery. The service, which has hundreds of millions users in 190 countries, was one of the first major brands to join AppGallery and is one of the most popular.
Viber, which enables voice and video calls, messaging, and group chats, has achieved a strong global presence with 62m app distributions¹ through AppGallery in regions including CIS, CEE & Nordic, and APAC since its launch 18 months ago. A third of all downloads has come from Europe, with 4 countries in the top 5 from the CEE & CIS region2. The two companies are now working together to deliver deeper engagement with the growing user-base.
Part of Viber’s success on AppGallery has been its ability to embrace Huawei’s “Global +Local” strategy, which focuses on developing relationships with app providers whose solutions are designed to give high quality, locally oriented services to people.
“Lots of popular apps offer global services but these are not always in-sync with users’ local needs,” said Derek Yu, Vice President of Huawei CEE & Nordic at Huawei Consumer Business Group. “Viber, which has a considerable global reach, has worked closely with us to feed the specific requirements of customers where they are, and this has reaped huge dividends. The Viber brand is a standard bearer for app providers on AppGallery.”
“We are very pleased to have such an important market player as Huawei as our partner. We are also glad that its users like our app. The data we receive from Viber downloads shows that our efforts are on the right track and our partnership is paying off. We are confident that our cooperation has a great future!” said Anna Znamenskaya, Chief Growth Officer at Rakuten Viber.
As part of the business partnership, Viber has released a customised app update, in which all Viber-owned sticker packs are exclusively free for users with the latest version of Viber app downloaded from AppGallery³.
To show its commitment and support for Viber, Huawei launched a dedicated country by country marketing campaign to support the roll out of free stickers, including a banner on the AppGallery home page, community posts, and promotions through its social and PR channels.
