The challenge

Nikkei Asia is an award-winning news website and sister publication of the Financial Times, offering in-depth reporting on Asian economies, markets, and geopolitics. Since 2017, Bluetel has been its trusted digital partner, delivering key projects including a full-scale rewrite of its website and the development of personalised newsfeeds through the innovative ‘My News’ feature.

Historically hosted on a separate platform, the Nikkei Asia mobile app was lagging behind the capabilities of its website, resulting in a disjointed, inconsistent user experience and problematic feature updates. Bluetel was briefed to solve the problem.

The response

We proposed a unified digital ecosystem that would enhance user experience, streamline feature development and ensure long-term scalability.

A tight turnaround of just eight months and the need for seamless transition shaped our approach.

We began by leveraging existing code from the website, porting it to the app using Capacitor and Ionic, before moving on to develop an optimised and scalable infrastructure powered by Fastly.

By designing a flexible monorepo and CI/CD workflows, we enabled concurrent feature rollouts across the app and website, boosting performance, engagement and retention.

And by integrating advanced analytics, we were able to provide Nikkei Asia with valuable user insights, thus enabling further refinements to its offering.

The outcome

Bluetel successfully delivered the new mobile app within the ambitious eight-month timeline, with seamless user transition. It now provides a refined, modern user experience with improved personalisation and functionality.

This transformation also played a crucial role in strengthening Nikkei Asia’s B2B product offering, driving optimised advertising opportunities and a more tailored digital experience for enterprise clients.

Moreover, the business can now deliver new features and initiatives more efficiently, while maintaining a consistent, high-quality experience across all platforms.

Bluetel is continuing to support Nikkei Asia’s response to changing market demands, strengthening its digital offering and ability to innovate at scale.

The boost

Establishing a shared codebase enabled simultaneous development across app and web, driving further efficiency and a fully coherent user experience.