LINE has been a high streak in the past year. They have experienced a surge of growth that has solidified the potential plans for the company to have an initial public offering, IPO to make the Japanese application a public company.
LINE was going along with the steady stream of corporate companies that have started off as private and later to allow people to buy shares in their company, went public, significantly increasing their value.
However, maintaining in the changing industry is not as feasible as one would like, there are various barriers that come along with the task. The South Korea Naver Corp that owns LINE, sense that there is something that must be straightened out before going along with the IPO, and shelved it to next year. They have not outright vetoed the idea to expand to the global market; however, they will come back to the idea by the next year.
Expansion into International Markets
Naver Corp stated in July of this year that they were trying to expand LINE further into Japan and the US markets. They viewed that expanding LINE into the global markets would provide new opportunities for LINE. They already filed in the Tokyo Stock Exchange that has yielded a value of $9 billion or 1 trillion yen.
This has been solely achieved in the Japanese market in which LINE has millions of users that use the app on a daily basis to communicate and send text messages. They have inundated the Japanese market in which they stiff competition by WhatsApp and WeChat. Naver Corp has decided to try their luck in the Korean and Chinese markets in which a large market share is divided between apps such as WeChat, Daum, and Kakoa Talk.
Yet To Reveal Their Future Plans
LINE has over 500 million users registered at the moment, which is feat for any company. Throughout their years, they have gained a steady following to stack up more users throughout the different markets. LINE doesn’t just limit itself to offering free voice calls, but also free text messaging, games, stickers, and several other services to their users. However, the more apps the come to market that offer the same services have given users several options that have created fierce competition for LINE. Began in Japan after the disasters in 2011 in which they experienced down phone lives, it provided the people with ways to communicate on the web. It has evolved into a communication solution that is much more sophisticated than it was years before.