Truecaller has landed a partnership with Huawei which will see its caller ID and smart phone book app pre-loaded on the fast-growing Chinese company’s overseas smartphones.
The deal represents the most significant tie-up to date for Stockholm-based Truecaller, which offers social features inside the caller app and uses a crowdsourced directory to help identify spam calls. The deal will initially apply to the Honor 8, Huawei’s latest flagship, when it launches next month, but a Truecaller representative told TechCrunch that the app will be pre-bundled on future Huawei phones sold across the U.S., Middle East, North Africa, South East Asia and India.
The companies confirmed that there is no financial element to this deal, rather it is a strategic deal to help both sides to grow.
Huawei shipped 100 million devices last year, a figure that was up 33 percent on 2014, with some 40 million of that number sold overseas. The company is looking to integrate third-party apps to go beyond stock Google services and make its devices standard apart from the crowded field of Android smartphones.
“As we were planning the launch of our flagship device Honor 8, we were looking for partners who can truly redefine the user experience, Truecaller was an obvious choice to help improve the native calling functions. They provide an indispensable service for millions of users each day. We are joining hands to ensure that respective brands get the best of both worlds,” George Zhao, president of Huawei’s Honor business, said in a statement.
That’s not quite all for today, though.
Truecaller migrated its standalone social calling app — Truedialler — into its main app in March, and the company revealed today that its users are now making more than 500 million calls per month. The average duration of each call is around 100 seconds, the company added. That’s pretty impressive when you consider that WhatsApp reached 100 million calls within its app per day earlier this year — yet it counts more than a billion active users.
Truecaller told TechCrunch only that it has seen more than 250 million downloads to date, with India its biggest market accounting for 130 million of those. However, a source close to the company revealed that it recently passed 90 million monthly active users and is closing down on 100 million. To date, the company has never publicly revealed its monthly active user count, and it declined to comment on our figure.
Back in 2015, we reported that Truecaller was in talks to raise $100 million at a valuation of over $1 billion. That funding never materialized, and speaking to TechCrunch earlier this year, CEO Alan Mamedi said the company doesn’t need capital it began to monetize via targeted advertising.
“We don’t need external funding, we’re actually making money right now,” the Truecaller CEO told us. “We’re in a really good position… we’re still a small company and I’d say we’re a very efficient company… Raising funds takes so much focus from your core business. Success has lately been seen as how much money you raise, I don’t see that as a healthy perspective. We’re focused on our product and bringing the best experience to our users.”
