- LINE is keenly eyeing the Philippine market, as it is filled with a multitude of opportunities
- LINE plans to collaborate with various Philippine companies and carry out local marketing activities to benefit users
February 14, 2013 – MANILA, Philippines: NHN Corporation introduced LINE, the world’s leading mobile messenger, in the Philippines at a press conference today. LINE offers free messaging, calling and group chatting, while integrating various social network service (SNS) elements in its features such as Stickers and Home & Timeline and LINE’s multiple family apps including LINE Game and LINE Camera, making it a ‘Smartphone Life Platform.’
Launched in June 2011, LINE has already surpassed the 110 million user milestone in 231 countries worldwide in only about a year and a half. Continuing this trend, LINE is tapping into this momentum to further expand its service worldwide, especially in the Philippines. It is keenly eyeing the Philippine market, as it is filled with a multitude of opportunities such as Philippines’ high smartphone penetration rate and its high potential market growth. In order to enhance the presence of LINE and its family apps in the Philippines, LINE has plans to actively carry out marketing campaigns like partnering with local artists, animation and entertainment companies to release various localized contents such as stickers and Official Accounts, solely for users in the Philippines. Moreover, LINE intends to outsource fun games through cooperation with game developers in the Philippines.
Director of LINE Business Office, NHN Corp., Mr. Hyun-bin Kang said, “Through the continuous release of features, LINE has become wildly popular in Asia and is also rapidly growing in North America and Europe, as well as in Spanish speaking countries. LINE is an ideal communication tool for the Philippines, the world’s text-messaging capital. Users can communicate through various methods such as free messages, local and international calls, and even by playing games together.” He added, “LINE’s fun stickers will also enable the users in the Philippines, who are known to freely express their feelings, to accurately illustrate and visualize their emotions. The Philippines is a new target market for LINE and LINE is striving to introduce localized dynamic and distinct features for users in the Philippines.”
As a leading innovator in the mobile communication field, LINE offers not only basic services including free messaging, voice call and group messaging with up to 100 people, but also value-added elements such as LINE Stickers to enhance the communication experience by incorporating emotions. In particular, there are four representative LINE characters, Brown, Cony, Moon and James. They each have distinctive personalities that have allowed them to gain popularity from users worldwide, who are fanatic about the wide array of dramatic facial expressions portrayed by these original characters. There are more than 200 types of stickers in which users can utilize while chatting to share realistic and vivid emotional expressions to invigorate conservations.
LINE is the world’s leading mobile messenger app that offers local and international free messaging, voice call and group messaging, while integrating various social network service elements in its features such as Stickers, Home & Timeline and numerous LINE family apps including LINE Game and LINE Camera, making it a ‘Smartphone Life Platform.’
LINE and its diverse features carry three major characteristics: social/interactive, fun/entertaining and easy/convenient. In particular, LINE provides fun stickers that allows user to express their emotions more freely and vividly with LINE’s various characters with distinctive personalities. LINE also offers social and interactive features such as Home & Timeline, a personal space where users can share their life stories by posting pictures, videos and location information, and Official Accounts that enable communication on a real-time basis with favourite celebrities, public figures and corporate brands. Furthermore, LINE is available for convenient use on almost all kinds of smartphones, as well as PCs and tablets
LINE’s Distinctive Features
- Users can share realistic and vivid emotional expressions while chatting for more exciting conversations.
- There are more 200 types of stickers that feature characters that all have particular identities (As of January 2013)
- After opening the “Sticker Shop”, where users can purchase fun stickers to send to friends, LINE became the top-grossing app in App Stores in various countries.
- LINE’s four representative characters have distinctive personalities that have allowed them to gain popularity from users worldwide, who are fanatic about the wide array of dramatic facial expressions portrayed by these original characters
• Home & Timeline
- 'Home' and 'Timeline' features allow users connected via LINE to enjoy sharing their most recent happenings and life stories with one another by posting pictures, videos and location information on their own space.
- The features serve as another trigger for communication since users will be able to check what their friends have been up to recently, in real time, without the necessity of sending messages.
- The release of Home and Timeline is a critical moment, which marks LINE's evolution into becoming a ‘Smartphone Life Platform,’ as it moves beyond merely sending and receiving messages.
Official Accounts
- Enables users add Official Accounts of their favourite celebrities, public figures and corporate brands to directly communicate with them and receive exciting contents.
- Not only can users follow updates from Official Accounts, but also interact with them in real-time during 'On Air Mode', when the Official Accounts can read and respond to messages from users.
- LINE plans to add more local celebrities and brands in each country to become more show its commitment to the local markets
PC version of LINE
- User can call his or her LINE friends from PC to PC as well as between PC and smartphones (iPhone/Android).
- To make it even easier to convey users’ thoughts and feelings, users can send text, photos and stickers even while on a voice call
• LINE Game
- Integrated with LINE messenger to enhance interaction with real friends, while sending gifts to each other and compare rankings
- Offer a new level of excitement by featuring LINE’s original characters
- As of January 2013, there are more than 10 games over 70 million registered players worldwide
LINE’s Mega hit Games
• LINE POP
- A simple puzzle game linked with LINE and patterned with LINE characters
- Goal is to match up three or more identical characters either horizontally or vertically as quickly as possible for a successful POP
- As of January 2013, LINE POP achieved 20 million downloads within 58 days since its release on November 19, 2012 and ranked first in the Top Free Apps chart in App Stores of 11 countries, including Japan, Taiwan, Thailand, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Indonesia.
• LINE Bubble
- LINE BUBBLE is a bubble-shooting game in which players have to fire different coloured bubbles into combinations of three or more to eliminate them.
- As of January 2013, LINE BUBBLE achieved 10 million downloads within 28 days since its release on December 22, 2012.
• LINE Camera
- Allows users to design, decorate, edit and then share your photos via LINE and other SNS
- Offers numerous decorating functions such as photo frames, stamps, unique filtered effects, brushes and font styles. Photos can be instantly shared with friends and family through LINE.
- Within ten months of its release, LINE Camera reached 20M downloads and ranked number one in the camera category of App Stores in 27 countries worldwide.
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• LINE Band
- A private mobile group service for managing real-life relationship as a group in a more private, safe and intimate manner
- Particular functions include a gallery where members of a group can see all photos shared and bulletin boards, a schedule check that includes members’ birthdays and anniversary dates, and even a poll feature that allows members to decide on time and place of a meeting.
• Other LINE Family apps
- LINE Anti-Virus is a free security software that protects users’ mobile devices from any security threats
- LINE Card allows users to select a perfect-greeting card from any category and combine this with a message and image of users’ choice.
- LINE Brush enables users make artistic impressions from photos, and draw anything
- LINE Café is a mobile community service where LINE users can share or chat about your favourite interests with likeminded people.
Further Information: The Latest on LINE’s Usage
1. Top 5 countries (in order of highest user numbers)
Japan, Thailand, Taiwan, Korea, Spain
2. Countries and regions where LINE has been ranked no.1 at App Store/Google Play (in the free apps categories)
Asia
Japan, Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, Cambodia, Laos, Kyrgyzstan, Turkey, Bahrain, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Jordan, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Israel, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Oman
Europe
Russia, Belarus, Spain, Switzerland, Latvia
North America
Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Panama, Honduras
South America
Ecuador, Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, Argentina, Peru, Chile, Bolivia, Paraguay, Uruguay
Africa
Mali, Angola
Oceania
Papua New Guinea
3. Frequency of Use
Monthly Active User：80.3% (as of end of December 2012)
4. Maximum number of registrations/day
600, 000 registrations (recorded on 16 December 2012)
6. Awards
iTunes BEST OF 2012: No.1 in Top Free category (Japan)
iF DESIGN AWARDS 2013: Cross-Media Advertising Award
GOOD DESIGN GOLD AWARD 2012
2012 Shogakukan Dime Trend Award
BEST TEAM OF THE YEAR 2012
The 17th AMD Award: Digital Contents of the Year ‘11
Nikkei Sangyo Shimbun: Nikkei Superior Products Service Award 2012
Nikkei MJ Hit Products 2012
Nikkei Trendy: Hit Products of 2012: No.2 out of 30
Top Worldwide in Non-Game Apps by Monthly Revenues for iOS/Google Play (November 2012)
elEconomista: Nominated for Best Technology Award 2012 (Spain)
EL PAIS: Nominated for Best Trend of 2012 (Spain)
7. Information on LINE related apps
No. of apps available: 24 (excluding web apps)
Download total: over 100 million
Visit here: http://line.naver.jp/en/
On Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/line.worldwide
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