Huawei AppGallery & Hungama Music Join Hands to Provide Exceptional Streaming Experience in the Middle East

Unlimited streaming of over 12mn+ popular songs, music videos and podcasts in 20+ languages on Huawei devices, for Huawei AppGallery users in the region

New Delhi, 7th July 2021: Huawei AppGallery, the third largest app marketplace globally today announced that its year-long collaboration with Hungama Music, one of the leading music streaming services in India is now expanding to the Middle-East countries. With an aim to boost their global reach, Huawei has taken an initiative to bridge the gap between Indian apps and global users, starting from the Middle-East.

The association will help Huawei’s Middle-East users to indulge in an enriching streaming experience with Hungama Music and allowing them to access over 12 million songs, music videos and podcasts in 20+ languages from the biggest Indian and international labels on its platform.

The strengthening of the partnership between Huawei and Hungama Music through the AppGallery’s expansion in the Middle-East region, will offer the users a fluid music experience along with the availability of a large local library. Hungama Music has association with Mazzika Group, a leading Arabic music production & distribution company in the region. The partnership will allow Hungama Music to offer more than 10,000 tracks from popular artists like Ahmed Saad, Hisham Abbas, Abu and Ahmed Gamal.

Hungama Music is the first Indian integration with Huawei to go live in international markets, namely, UAE, KSA, Kuwait, Egypt, Oman, Qatar, Bahrain and more. To create a holistic mobile ecosystem without geographical barriers, Huawei AppGallery is working with more Indian applications to support them with global exposure. This initiative will further diversify its existing app portfolio of over 2.3 million registered developers and offer a range of cross-border applications to its users. Previously, to attract app developers as well as to benefit them, Huawei AppGallery rolled out various incentives which included up to 90% of ad revenue to go to the app owners.

Commenting on the association, Mr. Lu Geng, Vice President Middle East and Africa, Huawei Global Partnerships & Eco-Development said -

We are excited to take our partnership with Hungama to the international markets. This association will allow an exceptional experience of audio and video streaming to Huawei’s users outside of India. It is a step forward to further strengthen our efforts to build a diverse app experience for our users. Starting from Middle-east, we are looking forward to taking the tie-up to the world’s market. Huawei has been committed to create an ecosystem where everyone has an opportunity to thrive. We will work with more Indian applications and take them to global markets.

Commenting on the association, Mr. Siddhartha Roy, COO, Hungama Digital Media said -

We are excited to strengthen our partnership with Huawei and expand the availability of our platform on Huawei AppGallery in the Middle East region. As a platform, we have always believed in building a robust distribution network that allows us to reach users across geographies and device ecosystems. We are certain that Huawei device users in the region will appreciate Hungama Music for its large and diverse library of Indian and international songs, music videos and podcasts.

Hungama Music is amongst the most popular music streaming platforms in the country, offering content across formats, languages, genres, and categories. Huawei AppGallery is amongst the top three global app marketplaces. It offers a wide variety of global and local apps across 18 categories, including navigation & transport, news, social media, and others. AppGallery is available in more than 170 countries and regions with over 540 million monthly active users.

Emphasizing utmost importance on privacy and cyber security, AppGallery is a trusted platform where every app goes through four major types of tests to ensure they offer 360-degree security to the user.

Xiaomi Makes First Investment In India, Leads Hungama's $25 Million Funding Round

Chinese Electronics giant Xiaomi has made its first investment in India, leading a $25 million (Rs 170 crore) funding round into Hungama Digital Media Entertainment, a Mumbai heaquartered aggregator and publisher of entertainment content on the internet.

Xiaomi, which will invest along with Hungama's existing investors Intel Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners and its Rakesh Jhunjhunwala, will pick up a minority, but undisclosed, stake in the company.

"Xiaomi is leading an investment round of $25 million in Hungama, with existing investors," said Xiaomi's head of international operations Hugo Barra. "At the same time we're partnering for video on demand service in India and integrating it into our platform".

The investment marks Xiaomi's first investment into a start-up outside its home market of China, and underlines the importance of the fast growing Indian smartphone market, which is well on its way to become a leading base of internet consumers, from the present base of around 400 million users.

Launched in 1999 by Ashish Kacholia, Hiren Ved, Lashit Sanghvi, Rakesh Jhunjhunwala, and Neeraj Roy as an online promotions agency, Hungama has since grown to where they also serve as an aggregator, developer, publisher, and distributor of Bollywood and Asian entertainment. Hungaman claims to beIndia's first and largest on-demand digital entertainment storefront

Post this investment, Xiaomi will integrate Hungama's video on demand service with the Mi platform available on smartphones and televisions, the latter not yet available in India. The companies did not divulge the timeline of integration, but said that post the integration, the platform will have some free and some paid content that will be part of the monetisation strategy.

China's largest smartphone maker is replicating its home model in India, where it has launched two of its leading smartphones in 2016, including the latest flagship Mi 5 last week. Though it trails top five players in the handset sales business, it is among the first amongst the deluge of Chinese players to have invested in a company in India.

In China, Xiaomi has invested in 55 companies which form part of the Mi Ecosystem. Of these, 29 have been incubated but only 20 lave launched products. About 7 companies of this subset have clocked sales of RMB 100 million and two - which make power banks and fitness bands - have surpassed the RMB 1 billion sales mark.

Xiaomi aims to have a similar ecosystem here and feels that video on demand is one of the fastest growing services which will become a key driver for users to get on to the internet.

Neeraj Roy, Founder and CEO, Hungama said that the investment will further strengthen the company's movie and television services, besides adding to its 65 million monthly active consumers across platforms that access music, video and movie services in several vernacular languages.

"Hungama Play (app) will shortly add 1500 hours of TV content in Indian languages and English," he added.