Windows Live Messenger Captures 98.82% of Instant Messenger Market in Brazil

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ComScore Inc, a leading marketing research company unfurled an striking report relating email and instant messenger market in Brazil. Data in the report shows that Microsoft is the ace in email as well as instant messenger, followed by Google. The report also included other IT companies with substantial growth. According comScore managing director of Latin America, Alex Banks, Microsoft exercises a strong foothold on many consumer applications in the Latin American marketplace. He also added that there were other software giants such as Google and Yahoo! flexing their muscles. Bank anticipates that the competitive landscape would changes over the next few years with so many consumer-focused Internet brands taking part in this digital gold rush.

ComScore’s survey in December revealed 24 million Brazilians aged 15 and older visited web-based email sites from home and work locations. A majority of them nearly 20 million can access Windows Live Hotmail. Next in the ranks was Google’s Gmail with 8.4 million visitors (up 51 percent from last year), Yahoo! Mail followed with 7.1 million visitors (up by 20 percent) and UOL Mail having nearly 4 million visitors (up by 14 percent). What’s most interesting, 34 percent of Hotmail users swayed to Gmail, where as 81 percent of Gmail users visited Hotmail.

Coming down to the Instant Messenger Application, again Microsoft’s Windows Live messenger rules the roost dominating 98.82% of the market in Brazil. However, this category on a whole is growing at a sluggish pace only up by 5% as compared to the total Brazilian Internet audience (up 20 percent). Further there are several smaller players such as EBuddy and Meebo in the IM market that are growing at substantial rate. Microsoft’s IM application is under threat with the raging competition in IM market. It’s high-time for the tech-giant to workout strategies ways to outplay the competitors to survive its dominance in the IM market, in Brazil.