TeamViewer opens its first office in Mumbai; eyes strong growth

Remote connectivity solutions platform TeamViewer has opened an office in Mumbai as it eyes long-term growth in the country and in the Asia-Pacific region. The company currently has offices in Germany, US, Armenia, Australia and Japan and after India, it would soon open up an office in China too.

"We had actually decided at the beginning of the year that we would really want to double down on Asia in general and become much more local. We should be active and with a team on ground in the strategic market of Asia; in markets of India, China and Japan. Therefore, we immediately executed on the strategy," Oliver Steil, CEO of TeamViewer told Business Today.

The company claims to have around 100 million installations of its software in India, however, the base of its paying customer only stands at 600-700 and the country contributes as low as 1 per cent to its overall revenue. But is has seen a strong growth in the country in recent years, which has been served by its Australian office for six years now.

According to the company, its installations in the country grew 23 per cent to 5,122,000 in Q1 of 2018 as compared to Q1 of 2017, while active monthly devices during the same period grew 28.6 per cent.

"We have a big discrepancy between the numbers of people using our software and the share of the users paying for it. We think one of the reasons for this is that we are not present here. So we probably need to work on the packaging, pricing, messaging, and campaigning. We want to become much more active here as the potential for us is huge here and in China," Steil said.

To tap on the Indian market, the company now plans to build a distributor network, and a partner network. Though it has a small team in the country now, which will focus on sales, marketing, and support centre, but going ahead it plans to hire more people.

According to Steil, as they understand the market better, they would be looking at expansion in the country and might even open up a research and development centre here.  It plans to grow 100 per cent year-on-year in the country.

"We always start with a small team to understand the market better. We have a growth oriented private equity shareholder, who is really happy to invest into additional growth, but we first like to understand where exactly, which segment, which vertical, and which location. We will move step by step," he added.