Kitab Sawti announces partnership with Careem KSA
Kitab Sawti, the Arabic audiobook production and distribution, has partnered with Careem in Saudi Arabia that allows Careem riders to exchange points for subscriptions on the Kitab Sawti app. This year alone the platform inked partnerships with Sharjah World Book Capital (SWBC) to provide its audio library to 5,000 readers, as well as launched a campaign with UNHCR to donate part of the revenues from annual subscriptions to support refugees in collaboration with influencers in Saudi and Kuwait.
The platform has seen unprecedented growth during the past few months as global and regional lockdowns started shifting consumer behavior. In the past 4 months, the number of installs and registered users on Kitab Sawti’s app has doubled, even more, the platform saw a 204 percent growth in total paid users, and a 6x growth of new paid consumers from January through to May 2020.
Founded in 2016, Kitab Sawti boasts the biggest library of Arabic audiobooks in the world, from globally renowned authors such as Stephen Hawking, Saud Al Sanousi, and even business editorials such as Harvard Business Review Publications. In 2019 the startup raised $6M funding from Bonnier Ventures, KAAF Investments.
Sebastian Bond, founder of Kitab Sawti, said, “New habits have flourished during lockdowns across the Middle East, and we have seen that coincide precisely with the growth in the number of users on the app across markets. We expect these new behavior patterns to persist as part of their routines. Audio content provides a resilient production cycle, even though affected by the pandemic, it’s faster and cost-efficient to adapt to new times.”
According to Deloitte, the global audiobook market was expected to grow 25 percent in 2020 to reach a value of $3.5 billion USD and they estimated that there were at least 500 million consumers of audiobooks globally. Meanwhile, the Association of American Publishers (AAP) latest report on April 2020 asserted that the “Downloaded Audio” format has seen continuous growth every month since 2012.
