Who owns viber 2022 android#
In 2021, Viber celebrated its 11th anniversary and crossed the threshold of 1 billion installations on the Android mobile platform alone, and the Greek government uses it for public announcements such as information on the pandemic. All one-on-one Viber calls and personal chats, and all group chats are protected by built-in. Each month, hundreds of millions of people connect, for free, with their loved ones via messaging, high-quality voice and video calls, and more. "The Covid-19 pandemic continued to change people's daily lives in 2021, and how society faced this new reality ," said Atanas Raykov, Senior Director EMENA of Rakuten Viber, adding that "I am glad how both users and businesses have recognized Viber as the main way to connect during these difficult times." Viber is a calling and messaging app that connects peopleno matter who they are, or where they’re from. Besides mobiles, the app is also available to all desktop and mobile operating systems. More than 8,500 companies worldwide rely on Viber to communicate with their customers, it highlighted. The application also saw a significant increase in new categories of advertising such as recruitment and local businesses, which reflects the pandemic's influence of the labor market, Rakuten pointed out. Business messages sent in Greece in total went up by 82%, a figure that includes customer support messages (36% up), promotional messages with offers and discounts (30% up), and a staggering 193% rise in the number of messages relating to order confirmations, shipment tracking and appointment reminders.Īdvertisement impressions in Greece (the number of times a user sees an ad on Viber even indirectly) in 2021 went up by 16% (70% globally), with sectors registering a 90% rise in health and wellness, a 56% rise in energy-related ad content, and a 51% rise in transport-related content. These figures concern a casual use of the app by regular users, but the company pointed out that business Viber accounts also increased in the previous year by 79% in Greece (55% worldwide). The largest volume of calls and messages were over popular holidays like New Year's Day and St. This translates to a 20% rise in call time, and a 15% rise in the number of sent text messages. Greeks surpassed a figure of 90 million hours in talk time over the last 12 months, and they also sent 700 text messages per second using the popular cross-platform app. In Greece, over 90% of smartphones have installed the app, making it the top chat application in the country. The report said that Rakuten's announcement comes just two days after Viber Media denied a report that it was in talks to be acquired by an instant messaging company from Asia for 300 million to 400 million dollars.Greek Viber users made 1 billion calls in 2021, revealed Rakuten Viber on Thursday, the company behind the popular call and text messaging app. Rakuten CEO Hiroshi Mikitani hinted that games are part of the company's plans for Viber and said that he was excited to welcome the messaging service.Īs Rakuten seeks to become the world's number one Internet services company, its acquisitions have included e-reading platform Kobo for 315 million dollars, Spanish streaming video service and Viki, a global video streaming platform that crowdsources translated subtitles, for a reported 200 million dollars. However, the Rakuten-Viber pairing might pose a significant new challenge to rival Line, which announced crossing the 300 million registered users benchmark back in November 2013 and is aiming for the 500 million milestone in 2014, Tech Crunch reports. The deal would allow Viber to potentially add Rakuten Group's nearly 225 million members to its existing user base of 300 million registered users. Japanese Internet giant Rakuten has reportedly announced that it is set to acquire messaging service Viber for a deal priced at $900 million.