App marketing with a few local channel in Thailand.

2017/02/01

Bumpei Tateno
Country Manager of Thailand branch, Global Business Division, Adways

Facebook like in any other country is a strong player in Internet advertising. In fact, Facebook has 38million users which astonishingly are equivalent to 56 % of the population. Consequently, Facebook’s App-Install Ad is a crucial advertising plan in terms of both quantity and quality. There are few ad networks who establish their local branches, Google Display Network holds a strong standing ground by having majority of the orders.

Finally, I would like to mention Adways contribution and achievements in Thailand.

Adways has its branch in Bangkok for 3 years now and has been working on advertising and media specializing in smartphone applications since the early days of application marketing. Through these years, our service called AppDriver, one of Japan’s largest reward ad networks, has also gained a strong presence in Thailand. Moreover, Seads, Adways’ non-incentive CPI network, has made a partnership with a prominent Thai mobile carrier to keep generating quality traffic.

Adways has managed to gain its achievements and know-how by having a local base in Thailand and we are very eager to share the knowledge with all the clients for their success. As we have data that cannot be disclosed here, please contact us individually for further information and assistance.

ADWAYS LABS (THAILAND) CO., LTD.

Key to a success in Thailand: payment methods.

2017/01/27

Bumpei Tateno
Country Manager of Thailand branch, Global Business Division, Adways

Credit card penetration which calculated by the number of cards issued is roughly 20% in Thailand, which is much higher than other countires in Southeast Asia. In actuality, however, I think this rate is around 10% because upper class tends to hold multiple cards.
Considering where Thailand is at economically, it is unlikely that the credit penetration will rise in 5 years. Even if the penetration rose, it will still take long to catch up to the mobile field. Despite the situation, Thailand has not introduced neither GooglePlay card nor iTunes card yet.

The pie chart above shows In-App-Purchase ratio by payment methods.

The actual ratio very much depends on each title, but overall in app purchase at App Store is 1.6 times as Google Play. One remarkable finding here is, almost 40 % of all payments are made by prepaid cards which do not go through either App Store or Google Play. These payments take place outside apps: usually bring users from Facebook fan pages to websites and users have to put their serial numbers from their prepaid cards.
As you probably know already, these prepaid cards could potentially be in a gray area, because placing Redeem in apps or bringing users from web pages, apps get banned from stores. Nonetheless, this is one of the quite commonly used payment methods introduced among Thai developers.

Overseas title taking up the top grossing ranking in Thailand.

2017/01/24

Bumpei Tateno
Country Manager of Thailand branch, Global Business Division, Adways

Oversea titles take up roughly 97% of the top 100 titles’ gross profit combined. 40% is Chinese titles, 30% is European and American titles and Korean titles are increasing in numbers.

*Counting LINE games as Korean titles.

Thailand has a mature mobile gaming market. It has been growing by 15-25% every year since 2003 and now the market generates roughly 25 billion yen every year. MMORPG, Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games, take up over 50 % of market share and First Person Shooter Games take up 26 % and most of the popular titles are from overseas. The reason why most of the popular title consists of foreign developers is that even after the device shifting to smartphones, there is an underlying mindset in Thailand that good contents are always imported. One of the secret ingredients of Thailand’s economic growth is to be very quick to adopt foreign industries and it can certainly be said about mobile gaming industry as well. Currently in particular, Korean titles are increasing their presence in the field. China has more overall new titles coming out, but Korean titles take up 45 % of TOP20 apps (*when 3 LINE games are considered Korean). Korea has been mainly focusing on its domestic market yet now it is starting to pay more attention to more global market especially in Southeast Asia.