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November 11, 2013 12:48 pm GMT
Line, the messaging app that blew up in Japan over the past two and a half years, is now bringing in nearly $100 million in revenue a quarter. The app, which spun out of its parent company NHN earlier this year, said it brought in 9.9 billion yen ($99.9 million) in net sales for the quarter ending in September. Overall revenues, which include the amount that Line has to pay out to the app stores and developers, has more than doubled in the past six months to 15.6 billion yen ($157.6 million). While there have been reports in local newspapers about an impending IPO next year, the company remained quiet on the subject in an interview on Friday. But we hear from sources closely connected with the company that they are considering an offering in mid-2014. “Of course you’re going to ask questions about an IPO,” said Jun Masuda, who had served as a chief strategy and marketing officer for Line’s original parent NHN Japan before switching over as an full-time executive on the app. “It’s a strategy we’re thinking about, especially looking at services like Twitter. Butat the current moment, we don’t believe that it’s something that we have to do right away. We currently have enough cash and we don’t have a pressing need to do an IPO.” Line has seen an astonishing rise for a skunkworks project that came out NHN, which is the company behind South Korea’s big search portal Naver. From its launch shortly after the devastating 2011 earthquake that crippled the Fukushima nuclear power plant, Line has accumulated280 million registered users worldwide. They have never shared figures on monthly active users. The app has totally saturated Japan with 49 million registered users and completely upended the mobile gaming market in Japan, undermining the historical power of gaming platforms like DeNA’s Mobage network and GREE. These two companies ruled in the feature phone era, but DeNA has now seen its shares slide 32.5 percent while GREE shares have fallen 41.5 percent over the last year.Line’s rise, along with that of other apps like Tencent’s Weixin (which has 236 million monthly actives), shows just how volatile the mobile social networking and messaging space continues to be. Now Line is picking up momentum in the gaming space, with 39 published titles and deals in the works to bring more third-party games from abroad over into the Japanese
Original Link: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/_a_ecHTK_14/
Messaging App Line Now Brings In Nearly $100M A Quarter, But No Official Word On An IPO
Line, the messaging app that blew up in Japan over the past two and a half years, is now bringing in nearly $100 million in revenue a quarter. The app, which spun out of its parent company NHN earlier this year, said it brought in 9.9 billion yen ($99.9 million) in net sales for the quarter ending in September. Overall revenues, which include the amount that Line has to pay out to the app stores and developers, has more than doubled in the past six months to 15.6 billion yen ($157.6 million). While there have been reports in local newspapers about an impending IPO next year, the company remained quiet on the subject in an interview on Friday. But we hear from sources closely connected with the company that they are considering an offering in mid-2014. “Of course you’re going to ask questions about an IPO,” said Jun Masuda, who had served as a chief strategy and marketing officer for Line’s original parent NHN Japan before switching over as an full-time executive on the app. “It’s a strategy we’re thinking about, especially looking at services like Twitter. Butat the current moment, we don’t believe that it’s something that we have to do right away. We currently have enough cash and we don’t have a pressing need to do an IPO.” Line has seen an astonishing rise for a skunkworks project that came out NHN, which is the company behind South Korea’s big search portal Naver. From its launch shortly after the devastating 2011 earthquake that crippled the Fukushima nuclear power plant, Line has accumulated280 million registered users worldwide. They have never shared figures on monthly active users. The app has totally saturated Japan with 49 million registered users and completely upended the mobile gaming market in Japan, undermining the historical power of gaming platforms like DeNA’s Mobage network and GREE. These two companies ruled in the feature phone era, but DeNA has now seen its shares slide 32.5 percent while GREE shares have fallen 41.5 percent over the last year.Line’s rise, along with that of other apps like Tencent’s Weixin (which has 236 million monthly actives), shows just how volatile the mobile social networking and messaging space continues to be. Now Line is picking up momentum in the gaming space, with 39 published titles and deals in the works to bring more third-party games from abroad over into the JapaneseOriginal Link: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/_a_ecHTK_14/
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