Taiwanese online shopping portal PChome Online Inc (網路家庭) yesterday launched an instant messaging application in a bid to enter the mobile messaging market.
“Instant messaging is a very important service on mobile devices. This means a new business opportunity and PChome will not be absent from it,” PChome chairman Jan Hung-tze (詹宏志) told a press conference.
The messaging app, named PChome IM, targets general users and is available in Mandarin and English, PChome marketing director Lin Mu-ping (林慕屏) said.
Photo: Liao Chien-ying, Taipei Times
The marking director said given that PChome has been in the e-commerce industry for decades and has more than 20 million registered users of the PChome shopping portal in domestic and overseas markets, the company hopes the app could gradually attract 20 million users.
She declined to provide a target timetable for reaching that goal.
Lin said the company’s in-house PChome Cloud Message technology will accelerate the message transmission speed to only two seconds, adding that senders will see statuses of “sending,” “sent,” “arrived” and “read” on the app.
The statuses are designed to relieve senders’ potential anxiety over not knowing whether their messages have been delivered, Lin said.
Lin said that unlike other instant messaging apps, users can download stickers for free from the app, while sticker creators are not required to pay slotting fees to PChome.
There are already more than 3,000 free stickers on the app, and PChome plans to launch a set of new stickers every day to attract users, she added.
Apart from PChome, the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI, 工研院) and telecoms Far EasTone Telecommunications Co (遠傳電信), Taiwan Mobile Co (台灣大哥大) and Chunghwa Telecom Co (中華電信) have also launched instant messaging apps targeting corporate and general users.
Mobile messaging giant Line Corp has the largest user base in the nation, with about 17 million registered users.
Separately, PChome yesterday released its latest quarterly sales results, posting NT$5.46 billion (US$175 million) for last quarter. That represents strong annual growth of 14.46 percent from last year’s NT$4.77 billion, but the figure is 6.5 percent lower than NT$5.84 billion in the first quarter.
The online shopping portal company’s consolidated sales totaled NT$11.19 billion in the first half of this year, an increase of 18.23 percent from NT$9.47 billion made in the same period last year.
PChome shares surged 2.39 percent to NT$471 in Taipei trading yesterday, outperforming the TAIEX, which gained 1.34 percent.
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