Vietnam’s biggest telco wants to acquire KakaoTalk for $5 billion

February 8, 2014 Leave a comment

Vietnam’s biggest telco wants to acquire KakaoTalk for $5 billion

February 6, 2014

by Anh-Minh Do

According to an article in VNExpress today, the vice president of Viettel, Vietnam’s biggest telco, wants to acquire Korea-based messaging app KakaoTalk for $5 billion.

UPDATE: Since publishing this, VNExpress has removed its article on the Viettel possible acquisition. When we contacted Anh Quan, he gave no comment, nor did his editor.

VNExpress reporter Anh Quan claims to have sat in on a board of directors meeting at Viettel where Nguyen Manh Hung, the telco’s vice president, made the announcement about a planned acquisition. Hung reportedly said:

We are talking with each other about buying KakaoTalk. One option is to buy the whole company or the second option is to buy into 70 percent of the company.

KakaoTalk – which has over 100 million registered users, mostly in South Korea but with about three million in Vietnam – could be useful to Viettel as a mobile and social service that’s already established and grown into a platform for many web services, such as social gaming and web publishing.

However, KakaoTalk co-CEO Sirgoo Lee told Tech In Asia this afternoon that the Korean startup has not heard of such a deal and they are currently not in any talks.

Lack of mobile services innovation

Viettel, which posted $6.6 billion in revenue in 2012 and is projected to earn about $8 billion in revenue once 2013 figures are revealed, is currently the market leader among telcos in Vietnam. Its biggest rival, VNPT, is close behind with $6.2 billion in revenue for 2012. Unlike Thailand’s telcos that work with and incubate startups, Vietnam’s carriers hasn’t been as adept at fostering innovation with value-added services for subscribers.

Such a deal would put Viettel on the map in the consumer space. Viettel has long been ambitious aboutexpanding outside of Vietnam with its telco services and acquiring KakaoTalk would allow them to access the large user-base on the chat app platform spread across Asia.

But this is all up in the air at this point until there’s a deal on paper.

 

Filed under TMT Trends

Unknown's avatarAbout bambooinnovator
Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

Leave a comment