Chinese Company to Invest $175 Mln Into Indian Rival to WhatsApp

Chinese firm Tencent and Foxconn decided to invest 175 million dollars in India's homegrown messenger service “Hike.” It is one of largest capital injections ever for an Indian internet project. Following this investment, Hike is now valued close to 1.4 Billion dollars.

The move will provide direct competition to rival WhatsApp, owned by Facebook.

“With our investment, Hike will be able to leverage our deep domain expertise in the messaging platform space to provide more value to its users in India,” Tencent President Martin Lau said. 

Tencent has vast experience in serving content and games to half a billion WeChat users.

In January 2016, Hike announced that it had a user base of a 100 million users. Hike users, on an average, exchange 40 billion messages per month and and each user spends an average 120 minutes per week on the platform.

Kavin Bharti Mittal, founder and CEO of Hike Messenger, said, “The new fund raise is going to allow us to push Hike to greater heights and invest in areas that will be key to our long term vision and success.”

India has the second largest number of messaging service users and localization may provide the upper hand to Hike in comparison to WhatsApp. Hike is available in seven languages. Facebook's WhatsApp, however, provides stricter in privacy features though.