Microsoft said this week that its Live Messenger instant messaging client has now reached some 300 million users.

However, in perhaps what's just as significant an announcement, Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) said those users are spread out among 76 nations and 48 languages worldwide.

The announcement came via a post on Microsoft's Inside Windows Live blog on Tuesday.

"People use Messenger for 163 billion minutes every month, which is about 9.4 percent of all time consumers spend on the Internet worldwide," Jeff Kunins, group program manager for social networking in Windows Live, said in the blog post.

"More than 40% of our users sign in each day (more than 130 million daily users) [and] every day, those users share over 1.5 billion conversations and send more than 9 billion messages," Kunins added.

While he did not give any figures for the U.S., however, Kunins did provide statistics regarding several other geographic areas.

For instance, 65 percent of all Internet users in Brazil use Live Messenger. In Canada, meanwhile, 48 percent of Internet users use it, while only 39 percent in the U.K. do so.

At the same time, 47 percent of Spanish users, 49 percent of French users, and 40 percent of Italian users all use Microsoft's instant messaging client. Those numbers swing higher for Turkey with 73 percent, Mexico with 72 percent, and the Middle East and Africa with 63 percent. Singapore comes in at 49 percent.

"At peak times, that drives more than 40 million 'simultaneous online connections,' the number of people signed in at the same time," Kunins said in the post.

Microsoft has been promoting its Windows Live properties, including Live Messenger, for several years with mixed success. Although its usage numbers continue to climb, the Live initiative itself is still a money loser, the company admitted last summer.

Still, Microsoft appears steadfast in its desire to move Live into the black, though it's thus far been scant on public details.

"Messenger is one of the largest-scale communication and sharing services in the world ... we’re thinking about the evolution of our role as a social application," Kunins' post said.

Stuart J. Johnston is a contributing writer at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals.