Online and offline digital content and file-sharing platform SHAREit is contributing to improving Bangladesh's digital infrastructure by making e-commerce and mobile financial service platforms serve underserved consumers.
As Covid hit, the use of online platforms exponentially grew with a significant surge in online shopping and payments.
Taking that into account, SHAREit has collaborated with brands like e-commerce platform Daraz and mobile financial service provider Nagad to understand and reach the potential customer base.
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It also facilitates the growth of other app-based businesses through its ad platform by curating campaigns to help brands reach out to an incremental and almost untapped audience.
To do this, SHAREit emphasises its localisation efforts, analysing the cultural background and language environment of a target market and adapting the app's design, interaction, and functionality accordingly.
"SHAREit unlocks the ability for many types of phones to share many types of content without the need for an internet connection or mobile data consumption and is downloadable for free," Karam Malhotra, partner and global vice-president of SHAREit Group, said.
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"Earlier, people were happy to play a 10MB game. Now, they're not happy playing anything less than a 1GB game," Karam says. "It went from Nokia's Snake to Call of Duty. The amount of data users required grew by 100x."
Malhotra adds that the quality of mobile internet connectivity remains poor in emerging countries, and people there also worry about the high cost of mobile data consumption.
These challenges around downloading content from the internet have shut people out from participating fully in the digital economy. An alternative for sharing content and apps would make a difference.
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"Near-distance peer-to-peer is the world's leading offline-online social ecosystem," Malhotra says. "SHAREit enables a digital economy we don't even know about."
A study by Google shows that most people discover new apps through friends and family.
Malhotra says: "Every popular game has at least 30 imitators. How do you know which is the legitimate one that doesn't have viruses, malware, or spyware? You ask your friend."
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SHAREit app's Peer-to-peer sharing option also organically improves digital literacy as friends trust and teaches each other about how apps work.