With the phenomenal growth it witnessed, there were some concrete plans for the Japanese messaging app LINE to go with an initial public offering IPO, which will make the company public.
All huge corporate houses are once individually owned and later adopted this platform to become a company where people could buy shares.
But, sustaining in the industry is not an easy task, as there are plenty of hurdles associated with it. Sensing that there are other things to look into, the now South Korea Naver Corp owned app has shelved the idea to go with an IPO this year. They have not permanently rejected the idea to open it up for the international market, but rather have said that the idea will be revisited again in the next six months.
International Expansion
In the month of July, Naver Corp said that they are planning to expand LINE into the US and Japan markets further. They opined that bringing it to the international trades will open up new horizons for the company. The company even went ahead with the idea to file in the Tokyo Stock Exchange with an amazing value of one trillion yen, which is close to nine billion dollars.
All of these have been accomplished by the app solely in the Japanese market where they have millions of users who use it daily to send text and other communication stuff. However, of late, they have almost saturated their market in Japan while there is tough competition being rendered by their counterparts including WeChat and Whatsapp. The owners decided to expand it to China and Korea where apps like Kakao Talk, Daum and Wechat together enjoy a massive market share.
Plans Yet To Be Revealed
At the moment, LINE has 500 million registered users, which is a massive accomplishment in itself. They have been growing steadily throughout the years. The messaging app doesn’t limit itself but continues to offer free messaging, voice calls as well as stickers and games, among other services that makes it a comprehensive solution. However, users have other similar choices as well, which creates heavy competition that LINE has to face in order to succeed. It was originally a web based communication system developed in 2011 to cope up with the disasters that took place in Japan, which downed all phone lines. It has evolved into a much more sophisticated communication solution for users in these three years.
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