SoftBank-backed Indian mobile advertising provider InMobi has set in motion an aggressive growth strategy in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, targeting a 10-fold revenue growth by 2026, a senior company executive said.
Significantly, the ambitious MENA market expansion plans of the mobile ad tech major – the first Indian start-up to achieve unicorn status in terms of venture funding and among the first mobile-only players to launch in the Gulf market – coincides with projections that mobile advertising spend in the region will double by 2025 from the current $5.45 billion.
“We’ve just had our best year to date – both on revenue and industry recognition. Our team is also growing, we’ve stepped up staffing and activity in Saudi Arabia, and we have big plans for the rest of MENA, Turkey and Africa, all driven from our Dubai office,” Andy Powell, vice president and managing director – EMEA, at InMobi, told Arabian Business.
“With the successes so far and coming up this year, we are working towards an aggressive ten-fold growth strategy by 2026. We also expect the MENA team to double in size over 2021 [during this period],” Powell said.
“Outside of this, at the start of 2021, InMobi brought in two new key hires: Damian Murphy, senior sales manager leading telco, BFSI (banking, financial services and insurance) and travel; and Abdallah Asfour, KSA sales lead. [We also have] further hires planned before the end of the year, plus the opening of a new, larger office in Dubai Media City,” he added.
Powell also said the MENA region is among the big focus markets for InMobi. “The fact that we’ve been here for ten years already shows that META (Middle East, Turkey and Africa) and specifically MENA is a high focus area for our business, not just on the mobile media front,” he said.
The senior InMobi executive, however, declined to reveal the company’s current revenue figures from the MENA region.
InMobi’s move to embark on an aggressive growth strategy in the MENA region comes amid reports about the former McKinsey consultant and Harvard Business School alumni Naveen Tewari-co-founded start-up setting its sights on listing in the US market by the end of 2021 with a $1bn offering.
Andy Powell, vice president and managing director – EMEA at InMobi.
The Japanese major SoftBank group invested $200 million in InMobi in 2011, its first bet in the South Asian country.
In line with InMobi’s growth plans in MENA, Powell also revealed plans for striking new partnerships in the region.
“We have a tier one, exciting local partnership due to be announced in September,” he said. “It’s an exciting time for the advertising industry across the region certainly, as economies reopen. But for mobile, there is a lot of innovation and excitement in particular. It feels like much of the technical work and investment over the past few years – both on the publisher and agency side – is coming to fruition,” Powell said.
SoftBank group invested $200m in InMobi in 2011.
“Mobile advertising has been in a state of continuous growth across the region over the past five years. It has also proved robust in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic: where advertising revenue was impacted across all channels, mobile was one of the least affected.”
According to the Emarketer data, the $5.45bn projected MENA mobile spend for this year is expected to double by 2025.
“In that time, mobile’s 50 percent share of total digital spend across the region is expected to increase by a further 14 percent,” Powell said, quoting market research reports.
The InMobi senior executive said the major factor driving the ad spends on mobile is because of the fact that consumers are spending more and more time on their phones.
“But that’s far from the complete story – the second reason is effectiveness – mobile is working for advertisers, delivering ROI (return on investments). And third, I think, is the level of innovation versus other channels. For example, when you think of the evolution of advertising formats – and therefore creative – for all of this, mobile is unmatched,” Powell said.
Powell also said they are planning to open a new, larger office in Dubai Media City.
Powell said the MENA region is expected to see the emergence of mobile as the dominant medium for advertisers.
“In some other regions this has already happened – both the shift from traditional to digital, then in turn to mobile. If the market research data is to go by, we actually see that we [MENA] may not be far behind after all – half of buyers across the market are already dedicating in excess of 30 percent of digital budgets to mobile,” Powell said.
Industry experts said the pandemic has been a boon for ad-technology companies as it has accelerated a shift to mobile in gaming, video streaming and shopping. Advertisers have been quick to follow and capitalise on the trend.
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