Remember this catch phrase?
Yup, there’s an app for just about anything.
It was a revolutionary concept at the time.
But instead of switching between several different mobile apps, what if there was a one-stop
portal for most of your needs?
Well, it already exist, and it’s called the ‘super app.’
If you’re living in China, I’d love to see someone who doesn’t use a WeChat or
AliPay at least once in a day.
It’s near impossible to do that.
So, what’s the story behind the most successful super apps and how did they become so popular?
In the first quarter of this year, there were more than 3.4 million apps on the Google Play Store
and 2.2 million on the Apple App Store.
Out of this, there are only a handful of super apps, but they have taken Asian markets by storm.
And nothing happens in the world of super apps without CNBC technology correspondent
Arjun Kharpal knowing about it.
He’s based in our bureau in Guangzhou, China, so we caught up via video call.
Hi Arjun, how’re you doing?
Hi Nessa, all good, all good here.
Looking forward to the chat ahead.
Before that, I wanted to ask you how many super apps do you have installed right now?
Three, something like three or four.
You’re based in China, so you can’t really escape super apps, right?
It’s ingrained in day-to-day life.
I’m in Singapore, I definitely have one.
I think you can guess which one it is.
I’ll take a punt and say Grab.
Yes.
So, in your definition, what is a super app?
When you’ve got a single app, and in that app, there's a ton of services that you can access.
That’s really what a super app is.
It’s got that utility for day-to-day life, but also all these other things you might
end up doing as well via those apps.
You open it up, and, voila.
It's a bunch of services, right, that are not necessarily related to each other, but
they're under the same umbrella app.
Some notable examples include China’s WeChat and AliPay, India’s Paytm, Singapore’s
Grab, Indonesia’s GoTo, Vietnam’s Zalo and South Korea’s Kakao.
It usually starts off with one service, like ride-hailing or messaging, before evolving
to include other services such as food delivery, digital payment, gaming, travel booking, bill
payments, mobile phone top-ups, music streaming, social networking, and the list goes on.
What these companies have managed to do is rack up huge user bases by dominating their market.
And that’s been very key for their success.
In Asia, super apps are a mainstay.
Grab operates in 8 countries, including Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.
The Singaporean start-up serves more than 187 million users in over 350 cities.
Meanwhile, GoTo Group, comprising Gojek and Tokopedia, is Indonesia’s most valuable
tech company, contributing 2% to the country’s $1 trillion GDP.
India’s biggest startup Paytm has over 350 million users signed up to their digital payments
service, and it’s also a fully licensed digital bank.
And South Korea’s Kakao has around 87% of the country’s total population on its messaging
platform, meaning that almost everyone uses the chat app.
Some of these countries have young generations, very digital savvy.
You see that in India of course.
They’re willing to just go straight to phones, digital-savvy, they want digital products.
And that’s something I think you’ll see in other parts of the world as well.
China, pretty much jumped straight into mobile quite quickly and so, the internet was developing
fast, smartphones got huge.
Manufacturers here were making quite high quality, but low-priced smartphones,
that’s been pretty key for the development of the super apps.
China is very, very advanced when it comes to digital payments.
You can go to a very tiny village somewhere, and someone’s going to accept AliPay and WeChat Pay.
But a super app also isn't a one-size-fits-all concept.
What’s successful in one country might not be successful in another.
Often, I guess it starts with a simple product, or a single product, you know, whether it’s
messaging, whether it’s ride-hailing.
And then they sort of tack on services.
What I think is the key though, is for these super app developers to localize their app.
A lot of people in Indonesia, they can’t afford cell phones, right?
So, when Gojek first started out there, they gave an incentive for their driver-partners
to sign on with them by giving them loans to purchase smartphones.
And I guess that move really paid off.
That’s a great example you just gave there of localization, of understanding your market.
Localization also means understanding the traffic conditions, understanding how transport
works if you’re a ride-hailing service.
You know, you can’t just bring the China model everywhere else, or you can’t just
bring the Singapore or Southeast Asian model everywhere else.
The popularity of super apps is not just limited to Asia.
The model is also spreading in places like Latin America and Africa.
What we're seeing in other countries as well, particularly some of the developing markets,
is their internet penetration is going to continue to grow.
There may still be somewhat of a digital gap in some of these countries, but as they continue
to grow, there are cheap smartphones now on the market as well, a lot of them from
Chinese manufacturers.
The user base of smartphones will grow, the population connected to the internet will
grow, and that will sort of help along with some of the growth of super apps, as well.
According to a global report, China and India have the most cell phone users in the world,
with Indonesia and Japan among the Asian countries featured in the top ten.
How come super apps have done so remarkably well in Asian markets, but we don’t see
super apps gaining traction in European markets, or even American markets?
Obviously China is unique in the sense that things like WhatsApp, Signal, Twitter, Facebook,
Google, are all blocked.
So that obviously cuts out a huge amount of competition out of the way.
The other point to make here is regulation.
In China, for a long time, these tech companies have grown to giants, unencumbered broadly
by regulation.
Now that’s not to say, for example, that the Chinese population does not care about
privacy, that’s incorrect.
What it is, is there hasn’t really been the regulation and laws to govern data, to
govern privacy, whereas, Europe, very strong on the General Data Protection Regulation,
that big framework.
And so, at points where super apps rely a lot on user data, to share between all these
things, and the company knows so much about you from using their service daily, that’s
not always an easy thing to do with data privacy and protection laws.
One thing you see in Europe, in the U.S., is the fact that competition is fierce among
the tech giants you know, Apple’s got iMessage, Facebook’s got WhatsApp and Messenger.
So at some point, it’s more disintermediated, more fractured, the market, in terms of services.
No one player necessarily always dominates a certain part, in order to create this super
app experience as well.
Maybe one of the conversations that we can talk about right now is the definitions, I
guess, of super apps in Asian markets and Western markets.
If you look at an Apple for example, it's an interesting one right started off with
iPhones, hardware, smartphones, but it's all about services now.
It's not a super app, but it's a super phone, right?
Everything's on that phone.
You’re on the iPhone, there you got Apple Music, Apple TV, you got iMessage, Apple Pay,
etc etc so, what they've done is a bit different.
In the sense, it’s a credit to these ecosystems of products, but it's unique because they
own the hardware platform.
The key is ecosystem here right, like how can you keep people, customers, engaged in
whatever products you have.
And so effectively you can sell them more, is the end goal for these companies.
Obviously, super apps, with their ability to traverse across different industries, have
a large, exclusive amount of access to user data.
Is this going to be a problem in the future, where data can be used against the consumer?
Each country’s going to approach data protection, data privacy and data in their own way.
You know, if you’re paying for something on one of Alibaba’s e-commerce platforms,
they know what you’re like as a consumer in terms of your purchasing habits that creates
an entire profile.
With new data protection laws in China, the question is how much data, what data, will
companies like Alibaba and Tencent be able to collect and to what extent can they share
that between their own services.
The other point here is the government is, to some extent, I would say jealous of the
amount of data that WeChat and AliPay, for example, have been able to garner because
this is so valuable.
Privacy is an issue with any tech company, right.
Yeah, I mean, these technology companies rely on data.
That's their business model and they rely on it for certain things, whether you're a
company that relies on advertising, you need to profile your users to serve the ads and
that's how they make the money.
To what extent can this data be collected and also, the control.
How much control the users have over what is collected and the data.
If you look at the GDPR regulation in Europe, that gives users some semblance of control,
some extent of control, about what data websites can collect, etc.
That’s quite a strong stance on privacy.
Question is how will that European level of privacy regulation make its way around other
parts of the world?
Because there's certainly, you know, parts of the world, that maybe it's not in the government's
interest to give users that privacy to allow encryption.
But it’s not just about the consumer.
We’re seeing super apps evolve into developing their own payment systems, so they'll need to
understand the needs of merchants and banks as well.
If you think about it, like, to sign up to a lot of these payments systems, you still
need your bank account, and you still need your card to be linked etc.
But the payments are happening via these apps.
And if you think about Alipay, which is issuing loans,
they're not necessarily underwriting the loans, the bank or the financial institution is still
underwriting those but it's going through Alipay.
All people know is Alipay is processing that.
And so that's another step removed, that customer is another step removed from the bank.
So, the banks are still benefiting from these tech companies, but they might not have that
relationship anymore with the customer.
So what’s the next big thing in super apps?
That’s a tough one, Nessa.
If I knew, I’d probably be a billionaire at the moment.
We’ll share a little bit of the pie.
You can take a stake, be co-founders, that kinda thing.
I mean, what you’re going to continue to see, no doubt is these super apps continue
to try to stay dominant.
How to keep, I think, your users stuck in your app, they're trying to learn that from
the likes of Tencent and Alipay as well.
I think for now there’s going to be a continuation of some of the things we’ve seen, tacking
on more services, localization, data privacy laws, data laws around the world, how those
fit into it as well.
And I think that’s going to be the key.
If you could add one thing in your super app, what would it be?
Wow, in my super app, what would it be?
That’s a tough one.
I’d probably add some more games, just to like, pass the time you know.
What kind of games are you thinking of? Like zombie survival games? Sudoku?
Something fun, some mobile games.
Maybe some sort of adventure games, it’d be pretty fun.