Viber, owner of the eponymous application VoIP, says it is open to a partnership with mobile operators in Africa.

In an interview with the niche siteLight Reading, Mark Hardy, director of marketing at Viber, said the company has “just started to build a commercial presence in the region, but we are certainly open to explore opportunities for partnership with telecom operators in African markets.”

While no official marketing campaign had been planned for the continent, growth in the use of Viber was prompted by word of mouth, explains the company. This allowed for a glimpse of the potential that this new market represents.

The partnership with telecom operators would also resolve all the blocking problems that the Viber application encounters from several telecom companies who see it as an unfair competitor, much like applications such as Whatsapp and Skype. These applications allow you to make calls and send SMS over the Internet, with more flexibility in their call credit. Viber users in Africa prefer to subscribe to a data plan and use the application to send unlimited SMS.

According to a study conducted by Xalam Analytics, the Heavy Reading research unit in Africa and the Middle East, the purchase of a data packet and its use with Viber or WhatsApp can help African mobile consumers save 40% to 99%, when compared to the cost of using a traditional telecommunication service.