Immigration and Business in Canada: Kik
Interactive is a Canadian startup that developed Kik, a highly popular chat application in Europe and America. Recently, Kik officially announced that it has secured a $50 million investment from Tencent, successfully bringing the company's valuation to $1 billion. This investment will provide Kik with more confidence in its financial capacity to compete with Facebook-owned Snapchat and WhatsApp.
Kik is headquartered in Waterloo, Canada, thousands of miles away from Silicon Valley, which is also the home base of BlackBerry. Over the past few years, the Kik chat application has accumulated over 200 million users. Recently, Kik has also integrated games and applications such as the online music service SoundCloud, hoping that these changes will help it continue to attract more new users.
Ted Livingston, founder and CEO of Kik, stated that earlier this year, Kik engaged the investment bank Qatalyst Partners to help explore potential revenue and investment opportunities with internet giants in Silicon Valley and Asia.
Livingston also remarked: "For anyone who truly understands social networks, Tencent has always been in a leading position in the industry, and that is our goal."
Currently, a spokesperson for Tencent has declined to comment on the matter.
Tencent has now firmly established a foothold in the U.S. messaging application market, having invested in both Snapchat and Kik.
Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel revealed in May of this year that Snapchat currently has 100 million daily active users.
These moves by Tencent may also suggest that the company intends to bring its popular Chinese apps, WeChat and QQ, into the U.S. market. Both WeChat and QQ currently have over 600 million monthly active users.
Livingston stated: "Competition among messaging app developers has reached every corner, resulting in dominant players emerging in each region, and WeChat has not yet truly focused its efforts on the U.S. market."
According to documents released by Tencent last week, growth in its core online gaming business has begun to slow. Tencent also indicated that it will focus more on online advertising services in the future, viewing it as a new key growth driver.
Tencent's net profit for the second quarter of this year grew by 25% compared to the same period last year, reaching $1.14 billion (approximately 7.91 billion RMB). Its total revenue also grew by 19%, reaching 23.43 billion RMB. However, growth in Tencent's online gaming business slowed from 28% in the first quarter to 17%.
Livingston personally likes WeChat and often compares Kik to the "Western version of WeChat" on his personal blog.
According to Kik's official website, approximately 40% of teenagers in the United States use Kik. A survey commissioned by Kik in January of this year showed that Kik users spend about 35 minutes per session on the app, a figure significantly higher than that of Facebook and Snapchat users.
Unlike other mobile chat applications, Kik does not require a phone number for registration. Livingston stated that this lack of a phone number requirement is very popular among teenagers who are reluctant to share their numbers casually.
Kik was founded by Livingston in 2009 while he was an intern at BlackBerry. In a funding round last November, the company secured over $40 million in investment from firms including Valiant Capital Partners, Millennium Technology Value Partners, and SV Angel.