WhatsApp Users Exceeded 500 Million Worldwide

Instant messaging application WhatsApp announced that the global number of WhatsApp users exceeded 500 million that the increase of Russia, India, Mexico and Brazil markets are notable particularly. In addition, WhatsApp users share pictures 700 million and 100 million video segments every day.

In this February, Facebook announced to purchase WhatsApp in $ 19 billion while WhatsApp will operate independently. At that time, the number of WhatsApp global users has reached to 465 million. Thus, the number of WhatsApp users is in rapid growth recently.

About to celebrate, WhatsApp CEO Jan Qom (Jan Koum) said: "We'll get all the engineers together to solve the common Bug." In his opinion, although WhatsApp is trumpeted outside,  all of them are focused on solving problems. Qom said that over time WhatsApp has took no big change, but about 1000 improvements are done.

WhatsApp announced the launch of voice calls in a few months during the Mobile World Congress in February this year. The major feature of WhatsApp is to launch a voice message on last summer. Slight change in this period including the new privacy settings enables users to decide the people who can see their status and pictures.

Viewing geographical point, Russia, India, Mexico and Brazil are the four major markets of WhatsApp.

Currently, there are 48 million active users of WhatsApp in India, which is largest number of WhatsApp users, equivalent to half of active Facebook users in India. The company has reached an agreement with local carriers to offer price of 30 cents a month for unlimited data to WhatsApp users.

In Brazil, WhatsApp has 45 million active users. Qom said: "Message grows rapidly in Brazil not in the curve, but a straight line growth." In Turkey, WhatsApp has 14 million active users. WhatsApp has just hired its first Turkish employees and recruited the customer service staff who are able to speak Turkish.

But WhatsApp is facing a lot of competition for application developers in instant messaging market, especially in Asian countries. The number of WhatsApp active users is less than less Line in Japan, Thailand and China Taiwan, less than KakaoTalk in Korea and less than the micro-channel in China.

Qom said that these competitors scored WhatsApp inherently market difficultly.