Having experienced explosive growth in Asia reaching 100 million users three times faster than Facebook, Japan-made chat app Line seeks to expand into the U.S. this year.
Line's developer, NHN Japan Corp., is "setting up a U.S. marketing team and planning joint promotions and content-delivery agreements with local companies," according to a Bloomberg report this week.
Line is currently popular in Japan, with 38 percent of its users located there, but it wants to reach 1 billion users globally and North America is in its crosshairs. Line services include free voice calls and it's available to users of Android, iPhone, Windows Phone, BlackBerry and PCs. The app has topped Apple's rankings of free downloads in 41 countries, according to NHN.
"This year, we want to capture North America," Jun Masuda, chief strategy and marketing officer, told BusinessWeek. "We're not focused on being in the black. It isn't time to cash in yet."
Line is known for cartoon characters that users can include in chat messages and is one of a number of apps from Asia challenging Facebook, Twitter and Microsoft's Skype. South Korea's KakaoTalk is looking to expand in Vietnam and Indonesia to build on its 82 million users, while China's WeChat has about 300 million users.
Line reached the 100 million-user mark 19 months after its June 2011 debut, compared with 49 months for Twitter and 54 months for Facebook, according to NHN Japan.
Line's group-messaging features could make it appealing as an alternative to Facebook, according to independent analyst Tom Taulli, via Bloomberg. Another analyst was skeptical that Line could get a foothold in the U.S. because its competition would simply match its efforts.
"In the U.S., things are clearly evolving in the direction of instant messaging and chat, and having a mobile experience across devices is important," said Clark Fredricksen, a researcher at EMarketer Inc. "There's clearly an opportunity, but also major platforms that are big enough and innovative enough could head off any threat from a foreign competitor."
Facebook had more than 1 billion monthly active users as of December, with 82 percent of them outside the U.S. and Canada. Twitter had 500 million user accounts in June, including about 140 million in the U.S. WhatsApp has been downloaded by more than 100 million users of Android phones, according to Neeraj Arora, a spokesman for the company, and it's looking to add more iOS users through offering unlimited service for $1 a year.
