LINE is one of the most popular messaging apps in Asia and in the Middle East, it’s not so popular here in the West, just yet. It’s right up there with the likes of WeChat and WhatsApp in those areas. The company is planning to do a dual IPO in the US and Japan, and will start trading in New York on Thursday and Tokyo, Japan on Friday of this week. LINE announced that the pricing for their dual IPO could raise as much as $1.14 billion making it the largest tech public listing so far in 2016. That’s partially due to tech IPOs being fairly quite so far in 2016. LINE has decided to price their shares at ¥3,300 – that’s around $493 USD.
According to a report out of the Wall Street Journal, the company had decided to delay their IPO price range in late June “as global markets reeled from the impact of the UK’s vote to leave the European Union.” Something that has affected many countries, both in the UK and outside of the country. The Journal also notes that the company had originally planned to set the share price at ¥2,800, instead of the ¥3,300 announced today. The company is said to be offering 13 million new shares in the Tokyo Stock Exchange and 22 million new shares in the New York Stock Exchange.
LINE had a gross income of $1 billion last year. This has made LINE one of the most profitable apps around. This is all due to in-app purchases for things like stickers, seeing as LINE doesn’t charge users monthly fees to use the service – like WhatsApp used to do, although very infrequently. About 60% of LINE’s income actually comes from their in-app game. It’s quite the lucrative app, and something that shareholders will definitely love. LINE is available on the Google Play Store, as well as other app stores in China and other countries. It’s a free app with in-app purchases. It’s not quite as popular as WhatsApp is, just yet, but that may change fairly soon. WhatsApp is currently the most popular messaging app in the world, with Facebook Messenger being a close second, both owned and operated by Facebook.