Truecaller hits 6.2m Nigerian mobile subscribers – Official

The Chief Commercial Officer, Truecaller, Mr Ted Nelson, said on Friday that the company out of the 150million phone subscribers in Nigeria, 6.2million had subscribed to Truecaller.

Nelson disclosed this on the side-line of the launch of its Developer programme in Lagos.

According to him, in Africa, we have 50 million registered users and this is about 20 per cent of total global Truecaller users.

“Africa is growing and it is important for us, to establish our presence to be felt in Africa, there is need for us to understand the market and to enable us grow faster as a brand.

“This is currently carried out by studying most likely Nigeria and South Africa for us to gain our subscribers base,’’ he said.

Nelson said that presently, we have good position both in Google play store and Apple play store as Truecaller in Nigeria and this was amongst the top five download in the past two-years.

He said the market was growing and that the company would leverage on smartphone penetration increase to become stronger.

He said this was to engage technology developers was the objective of the company in kicking off the African tour, which started in Nigeria in partnership with CcHUB, Africa’s leading social innovation centre.

“To launch our Truecaller Developers Programme, which is becoming the major skill in the India environment, is also why we are here in Lagos, Nigeria.

“We want the same in Africa and so we want African developers to access the tools that we can offer when it comes to making communication more safe and beneficial.

“The Developer Programme, ‘Truecaller SDK’ is a mobile identity product for digital start-ups and app developers.

“Truecaller SDK enables third party app developers, digital businesses and start-ups to verify end users quickly and frictionless by utilising their Truecaller profile with a one-touch and password free experience,’’ he said.

He said that the Truecaller app, allows people to see who was calling and filter out spam calls and SMS.

“The service is helping users block more than half a billion spam calls on a monthly basis in the region, and more than 50 per cent of all messages being filtered is considered as spam,’’ he said.