BBM Closes Down Headquarters in Singapore and Canada

Creative Media Works (CMW), BBM's parent company, confirmed the closing of Singapore and Canada's headquarters as an effort to improve efficiency. Although, the company make sure that the business will run as per usual.

Hermawan Sutanto, BBM's COO said to DailySocial, the step taken is to affect all employees in Singapore and Canada as layoff. There are 120 employees affected by this.

There's no plan to cut employees in Jakarta branch. However, based on a trusted source, there will be outsourcing employees to help other platform development in Emtek Group.

BBM is reportedly underachieved the expected growth throughout 2018. The restructuring should reduce the costs for operations, while exploring the right business model for the messaging platform managed by Emtek Group since 2016.

Emtek Group partnership with Blackberry for BBM is worth of $207.5 million (more than 2.7 trillion rupiah at the current rate) within six years - to 2022.

BBM is now positioned as super app with integration of payment (Dana), shopping (Bukalapak), and entertainment platform (Vidio, game, komik).

According to App Annie, BBM is not included in five best app, based on the average of monthly active users, in Social and Communication category throughout 2018.

We didn't get the latest data of BBM's active users, both global and in Indonesia. In 2016, when CMW took over BBM, it is said to have 60 million active users in Indonesia.

– Original article is in Indonesian, translated by Kristin Siagian