SEOUL, Sept. 29 (Korea Bizwire) – Naver Corp., South Korea’s largest Internet portal, and its mobile messaging affiliate Line Corp. said Thursday they will invest 100 million euros (US$112.2 million) into a French venture fund set up by France’s first South Korean-born minister, Fleur Pellerin. Naver and Line will invest 50 million euros each into [...]
SEOUL, June 28 (Korea Bizwire) – Japan-based global messaging app operator LINE Corp. said Tuesday that it has set the price range of its initial public offering (IPO) at between 2,700 yen and 3,200 yen (US$31.60) a share, roughly matching its previously hoped-for price of 2,800 yen per share, amid increased market tumult sparked by [...]
SEOUL, May 13 (Korea Bizwire) – LINE, the mobile messaging app of South Korean portal giant NAVER, has beaten its rivals in sales of applications available on Google Play Store for the past four years, a global industry tracker said Friday. In the four years up to March this year, the Korean messaging app topped others in [...]
SEOUL, March 24 (Korea Bizwire) – The number of LINE messenger users operated by the Japanese arm of South Korea’s top portal provider Naver Corp. has surpassed the 1 billion mark five years after its launch in 2011, the company said Thursday. The number of monthly active users, or MAU, of the social networking mobile application stood at 215 million globally as of [...]
SEOUL, Feb.26 (Korea Bizwire) – Line, an affiliate of Naver that provides mobile messaging services, announced that it is setting foot in the Indonesian O2O (online to offline) market in alliance with a local motorcycle taxi service. ‘Go-JEK’, the Indonesian affiliate of Line, is the No.1 business in motorcycle taxi services. The company operates 200,000 [...]
SEOUL, Oct. 22 (Korea Bizwire) – Naver’s global messenger ‘LINE’ is dominating mobile communications in Thailand with the lion’s share of the mobile messenger market. According to Naver, there are currently 33 million LINE users in Thailand. Considering that the country’s total population is 68 million and that 63 percent of Thais own a smartphone, [...]
SEOUL, July 31 (Korea Bizwire) – With rapid growth in the character business that features collaborations between the emojis of mobile messengers like KakaoTalk of DaumKakao and Line of Naver, the two largest IT companies in Korea are enjoying the effect of killing two birds with one stone. As the “Kakao Friends” and “Line Friends” emojis raise [...]
SEOUL, May 20 (Korea Bizwire) — For Yang Jun-mo, a 26-year-old graduate student in Seoul, visiting a neighborhood convenience store for light snacks is a daily routine. But every time, there is one thing that grabs his attention: his favorite brands of bread come with collectible stickers of emojis from free mobile messenger KakaoTalk. “It kind [...]
SEOUL, April 20 (Korea Bizwire) — South Korea’s top portal operator Naver said Monday that its free messaging app Line will be pre-installed on Microsoft‘s soon-to-be-released Lumia 540 smartphone, reflecting its growing popularity around the globe. “The Lumia 540 will be pre-installed with the Line application, although it does not mean that all of the future [...]
SEOUL, April 14 (Korea Bizwire) — KakaoStory, a photo-sharing service operated by Daum Kakao, was the most popular social networking service (SNS) in South Korea last year, a poll showed Tuesday, outpacing Facebook and other global platforms. According to the survey conducted by Hankook Research on 9,381 people aged between 13 and 69, 51.8 percent [...]