News From Vietnam: Coc Coc’s and Zalo’s Growth, Launch of FPT Ventures
DEALSTREETASIA: Vietnam-based Coc Coc has become the second most popular search engine in Vietnam, after Chrome. Three months after it received the $14 million funding from Hubert Burda Media in February this year, the ad sales have jumped two times, while the subscription for Coc Coc search has increased by 32 per cent. This was revealed by the company’s co-founder Le Van Thanh at the FPT Techday in Hanoi last week. Coc Coc was founded in 2007, inspired by Russia’s Yandex, but its products were commercialised during the last three years, since 2013.
It’s products have gained more attention, after the German investment was disbursed and the company declared that it would be competing with Google Chrome in Vietnam
“Hubert Burda Media poured its money in us, after it saw our impressive growth figures,” said Thanh, stating that it took the German investor only six months from approaching Coc Coc to making an official investment.
Meanwhile, the initial investment in the company happened in 2007, when it was founded by three Vietnamese programmers in Russia. This investment was made by Victor Lavrenko, who is currently Coc Coc’s chief executive. “We had no achievement back then, so Lavrenko must have foreseen the company’s potential,” said Nguyen Thanh Binh, co-founder of the company.
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TECHINASIA: At the very top of the chain of Vietnam’s tech startup industry is FPT. In its annual report last year, FPT announced that it hit US$1.65 billion in revenue in 2013. That’s considerably more than any other tech company in Vietnam, partly because FPT does everything from software outsourcing to infrastructure, to telecommunications to education. It’s also 27 years old. That means this megalithic giant has considerable history and influence over Vietnam’s technology direction. Thus, today’s announcement that FPT would be starting its own venture capital arm with FPT Ventures is a huge step for the corporate giant and a potential ripple effect for Vietnam’s startup community. Read more
TECHINASIA: Today, VNG announced that it just hit 30 million registered users worldwide on its chat app Zalo. Zalo now sees 400 million messages per day. That’s up 10 million more users from November last year and nearly 20 million up from this month last year. Read more
