Line is a Japanese made messaging app that seems to be quickly acquiring its lion share of users. With the impressive rate of growth it experienced over time, their officials had a solid plan to enter the market with their Initial Public Offering (also known as IPO). However, the whole idea seems to be delayed for some reason. Here are some details that might shed some light on the matter at hand.
First of all, it is not an easy task to sustain the price of your shares in such a huge and volatile market. Perhaps the now South Korea based Naver Corp (creators of LINE) thought that they have other, more pressing matters to worry about. The whole idea of IPO was rejected, at least for this year. However, it is still in the realm of possibilities and is not fully rejected. Naver officials reported that they will be revisiting the idea during the next 6 months or so.
Some time during July, this company’s representatives said they have plans for expanding the LINE app even further into the US and Japanese markets. They also added that they are very excited about this because of all the new horizons and potential opportunities this act would offer. The company even wants to file in the TSE (Tokyo Stock Exchange) with an impressive sum of 1 trillion yen (which is approximately 9 billion dollars).
Of course, LINE has mostly the Japanese market to thank for their huge success. This app has numerous millions of users there who use it every day. However, this growth can’t possibly continue forever, so they’ve hit their saturation point and now they have to compete with such serious opponents as Wechat and Whatsapp. The company’s next step was expanding to China, where all the popular messaging apps like Kakao Talk, Wechat and Daum are all enjoying a tremendous share of the market together.
Possible future plans for the company:
If you take a look at LINE’s user database right now, you will see more than 500 million registered users there. This number sure does look impressive. However, do not forget that this is the result of numerous years’ worth of hard work and strategic planning. Also, the fact that this app is not limited to just the messaging services helps out a great deal. They also provide such services as voice calling, stickers and video games and so on. The number of options they provide steadily continues to increase, even to this day. However, as wonderful as this particular app may be, there are still a lot of worthy alternatives to choose from nowadays. This creates a heavy competition for LINE and other younger messaging apps out there. Originally, LINE app was created in order to help Japanese people communicate when all of Japan’s phone lines went down. This terrible event happened in 2011, which is also the year that this app was created. Since then, it has experienced various improvements and transformed into this popular app that we know today.