Until now one of the few true internet success stories that came out of SA has been the Mxit service, which enables users to chat with friends and take part in chatgroups. It currently operates in 120+ countries, with huge interaction and user loyalty.
The Stellenbosch based Mxit group has always been run by Herman Heunis, but now the group has been acquired by World of Avatar, another Stellenbosch based group which is headed up Alan Knott-Craig Jnr, who is known to have started iBurst networking. He is also of course known because his father is Alan Knott-Craig Snr, the former CEO of Vodacom.
According to Memeburn, Mxit has been looking for a seller for the bigger part of 2011, and Knott-Craig has always been an interested buyer. While the deal is now official, it seems that Knott-Craig does not plan to radically change the service at first.
Clearly the current formula works – he gives some pretty good stats for a service some of us write off as a kids only service:
“Twitter does 8-billion messages a month, MXit does 22-billion a month. Your average Facebook user spends 15 hours a month on Facebook, your average MXit user spends 45 hours month on MXit, people don‘t know this. It is a massively engaged, massively active audience.”
Count us impressed.
Source: Memeburn
Image: MyBroadband
