India is becoming a hotbed of activity in the instant messenger space: after WeChat and LINE, South African mobile messaging company Mxit is making its way to the country. The company announced its launch in Hyderabad earlier this week, with the opening of an office in the city. It's hosting another launch event today in Delhi, and has appointed former Cricketer Gary Kirsten as its Brand Ambassador in the country. Sam Rufus Nallaraj will be heading Mxit's initiatives in India, as the CEO of Mxit India Pvt Ltd. Mxit is currently available in English and Hindi, and the company is working towards offering 10 Indian languages (Bengali, Telugu, Marathi, Tamil, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Punjabi, Assamese and Oriya) within 6 months. It's an app that also works on feature phones, so apart from iOS, Android, and Windows, it is also available in a Java for feature phones. Despite the proliferation of smartphones in India, and smartphones being available at Rs 4,000 (sub-$100) the country remains a largely feature phone market, even though the switch is imminent. Mxit claims to work across 8,000 different phones. It claims that around 46% of mobile Internet users are on its platform in South Africa: a feat, in terms of percentage, that even Whatsapp hasn't been able to achieve in the country, despite having around monthly active 36 million users. Naspers Had Exited Mxit In 2011 What's interesting about Mxit is that it's a company that Naspers bought stake in, and then exited. Mxit was early in the…
