Line, which is owned by the South Korean company Naver Corp, has appointed Nomura Holdings and Morgan Stanley to manage the IPO. The company is targeting the listing to commence in November. It plans to have a Tokyo bourse listing and a US listing in either Nasdaq or the New York Stock Exchange.
The company's decision to go public began when Naver was rumored to seek its listing on the Japanese equity market within the year. Naver was requested by financial authorities to come up with an official statement upon addressing its investors.
Local analysts have already anticipated about Line's move to be listed on stock markets towards the end of the year. The forecast came amidst the growing popularity of the messaging app on a global scale.
Dubbed as the most popular mobile messaging company in Japan, Line Corp now has earned millions of subscribers from Asia and Latin America with a record-setting downloads of over 480 million globally. The company credits its popularity to its games and larger-than-usual emoticons which are otherwise known as stickers.
The brainchild of NHN Japan's engineers, Line Corp was launched in June 2011 and currently supports 17 different languages. In addition to having users from Japan and South Korea, the company has initially provided service to users from Malaysia, Mexico and the US. Now, Line has users coming from 231 different countries which include Indonesia (20 million), Thailand (22 million), Taiwan (17 million) and Spain and India with each country having 16 million users. Some of its popular features include multi-platform accessibility, adding friends by simultaneous shaking of their phones, creating and joining groups where users can chat and share media, sending update on one's current location, message box that can directly pop-out for easy reading and responding, personalized themes and a whole lot more.
For the period between January and March, Line Corp's total revenue increased by as much as three times when it reached a whopping 14.6 billion yen. Based from the analysis of App Annie, an analytics firm, Line was 2013's highest earning non-game app with last year's full sales to have hit the 51.8 billion yen mark.
Line Corp's decision to pursue a share sale had been confirmed after Viber and WhatsApp were acquired by Rakuten, Inc., a Japanese electronic commerce and Internet company headquartered in Tokyo, and Facebook respectively. The company had chosen to sell ordinary shares as a way to increase the proportion of retail investors in Japan.
