Short Video Platform Kuaishou Ramps Up Expansion in Brazil and Southeast Asia, Heating Up Competition with Rival TikTok
China’s second-largest short video app Kuaishou is investing extensively in Brazil and Southeast Asia to expand its overseas customer base, aiming to increase its market share amid competition with TikTok.
Kuaishou this year has prepared a budget of one billion dollars to gain more users overseas, with at least 100 million in Brazil, Chinese media LatePost reported, citing sources familiar with the matter.
The company mainly uses incentive schemes to attract new users. Current users can receive an average of six dollars cash-back after inviting people to register a new account. Kwai, international version of Kuaishou, is currently gaining at least 400,000 new users on a daily basis, according to LatePost.
After raising $5.4 billion from a Hong Kong IPO in January this year, the company’s share price slumped in May with losses continuing to mount, reaching $764 million in the first quarter. Kuaishou says the widened loss is mainly due to surging sales and marketing expenses, claiming roughly 69 percent of revenue.
SEE ALSO: ByteDance’s Rival Kuaishou Shares Slide as Live-streaming Revenue Drops and Losses Widen
This is not the first time for Kuaishou to expand its overseas operations in a world obsessed with TikTok. Established in 2017, Kwai successfully seized the attention of the Brazilian market, where is ranked first among the country’s most downloaded apps, according to App Annie analytics. In the same year, ByteDance purchased Musical.ly for one billion dollars and entered the US market through the newly-acquired app’s user basis.
Kuaishou launched its own short video sharing platform Zynn targeting the North American market in 2020. Zynn quickly surged to the top in the download list, but was later taken down by app stores amid accusations of plagiarism, Wired reported.
SnackVideo, another short video platform for overseas users launched in April last year, has also made progress in Indonesia. Sensor Tower’s investigation shows that it once ranked 22nd in the country’s app store.
At the beginning of this year, Kuaishou turned to Brazil and Indonesia and later expanded to the entire Latin American and Southeast Asian markets, aiming to defeat TikTok in the new battle ground.
By early May, Kwai had amassed more than 23 million daily active users in Brazil, twice the quantity in the same period last year. Kuaishou has nearly 9 million daily active users of SnackVideo in Indonesia.
