The parent company of Snapchat has reported a significant 21% growth in daily active users in the "rest of world" region – which includes Asia-Pacific – for the second quarter.
"Rest of world", which now counts 56 million DAUs, was the highest growth region for users in the quarter, compared with 5% growth in DAUs in Europe (which includes Russia and Turkey) and a 3% increase in North America (which includes Mexico, the Caribbean and Central America).
Overall, Snapchat added 13 million DAUs in the second quarter, bringing its total global figure to 203 million.
This was the second consecutive quarter of growth for the company, which saw its user base fall from 191 million DAUs in the first quarter of 2018 to 188 million the following quarter.
However, this is still significantly fewer than Instagram Stories’ 500 million DAUs as of January. Snapchat is also facing stiff competition from 15-second video app TikTok, which reportedly has more than 200 million DAUs in China alone (although this is not an official figure).
From a revenue perspective, Europe recorded the highest growth in the quarter, up 53% to $61m year on year. This was followed by "rest of world", up 49% to $67m, and North America, up 47% to $260m.
Total global revenue for the second quarter reached $388m, up 48% compared with a year ago.
While North America still accounts for the lion’s share (67%), this is marginally down from 68% in the same quarter in 2018, as Europe’s share increased to 16%. "Rest of world" was flat, accounting for 17% of revenue.
Snap has invested in various product features this year to try to capture more growth outside the US.
In April, it released an updated version of its Android app to address complaints of a poor user experience. Snap chief executive Evan Spiegel said that the change encouraged Android users to send 7% more snaps compared with the previous version.
In 2019, the company also launched in eight languages that are spoken by more than 750 million people globally, including Hindi, Punjabi, Marathi, Gujarati, Vietnamese and Urdu. The majority of the new languages are spoken in India, which is Snapchat's sixth-biggest market in terms of users, according to Statista data.
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