Snapchat has recently reported its earnings and userbase. In the quarterly earnings call, Snapchat’s CEO Evan Spiegel said the company witnessed over 100 percent growth in daily active users over the past year in India.
Globally, Snapchat says it has crossed 238 million active users. The company added 9 million new daily active users in the past quarter. Surprisingly, the US contributed just 2 million to this, while Europe witnessed a mere 1 million growth.
The other 6 million growth comes from the ‘rest of world’ category. Unfortunately, Snapchat did not reveal the exact user numbers for the Indian market. However, judging by the exponential growth, we could expect the country to have accounted for a significant portion of the 6 million users.
Snapchat credits its localization efforts for the growth in India. Notably, the company added support for five Indian languages namely Bengali, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, and Telugu earlier this year. The app had already added Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, and Punjabi last year.
“We see a significant opportunity to continue to grow our community as we further invest in localization of our product through language support, local content, and marketing partnerships across a variety of geographies,” said Snap CFO Derek Andersen.
Another key reason is Snapchat’s revamped Android app. In case you’re out of the loop, Snapchat released an updated version of its app on Android in April 2019. This update fixed most of the performance issues users have been facing in the older versions.
Going forward, Snapchat is planning to create new experiences powered by AR, entertainment, and commerce. Spiegel also pointed out that the number of Snaps created every day grew at double the pace of daily active user growth over the past year.
