LOS ANGELES, July 30, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- LINE Corporation,
owner and operator of the free call and messaging app LINE, today
announced their Q2 (April-June) earnings for 2015.
LINE Corporation's revenue* for the quarter was
JPY 27.8 billion, an increase of 37%
over the same quarter in the previous year.
The revenue for LINE Corporation's core business, LINE, totaled
JPY 25.3 billion in the second
quarter, an increase of 39% over the same quarter in the previous
year.
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*Consolidated performance including subsidiaries such as LINE
PLUS Corporation and LINE Business Partners Corporation.
The Monthly Active User (MAU) count for LINE (as of June 2015) totals 211 million globally. With the
recent rapid acceleration of user growth in Indonesia particularly noteworthy, the number
of new users and MAU continue to grow across the globe.
In the Sticker business, Official Account stickers and Creators
Market stickers continue to perform strong. Official Account sound
stickers have been well-received and are experiencing growing sales
in their initial market in Japan
as well as Thailand and
Taiwan. LINE Creators Market, a
platform that allows users to sell and buy stickers created by
other users, celebrated its first anniversary in May and continues
to expand with total sales reaching JPY 8.94
billion and the top ten Creators earning more than
JPY 100 million on average. LINE has
also released LINE Creators Management, a service that helps
top-selling Creators merchandise and manage product rights.
LINE GAME released six titles in
the second quarter of 2015. LINE Bubble 2, a bubble-shooting game
launched globally in April, continues to show steady growth in user
acquisition and sales with a marketing campaign that includes TV
commercials airing in Japan this
July. As it continues to expand both in Japan and overseas, LINE is actively investing
in game content developers through its "LINE Game Global Gateway"
investment fund. In the second quarter LINE invested in three
projects/companies, including social and smartphone app developer
TriFort, Inc. (Headquarters: Shibuya, Tokyo; Representatives: Yasuaki Omata/Shintaro
Otake). LINE will continue to provide new titles in a wide
variety of genres that cater to the needs of regional markets as it
aims to further expand the user base of LINE GAME and accelerate sales.
LINE is also experiencing growing sales for its respective
advertising services with the number of Official Accounts robustly
growing in Thailand, Taiwan and Indonesia. LINE enabled advertising with LINE
TV in Thailand, a video
distribution service, and through LINE Business Connect, a
business-oriented API that includes many Official Account features,
offers a high degree of customizability for companies. LINE
Business Connect has been successfully employed by a power company
for customer inquiries on moving procedures, by a real estate
company to support property listing searches, and other companies
for product promotions. LINE is also constantly introducing new
advertising services such as "LINE Must-Buy Coins," an incentive
program which provides coins that can be exchanged for stickers,
themes and other virtual goods to buy a certain product, visit a
certain store, or fulfill other conditions.
LINE continues to drive ahead with its LIFE Platform Strategy,
aiming to make LINE a company that provides content and services
that are even more integral in modern people's lives. The on-demand
music subscription service LINE
MUSIC has been well-received since its launch in
Thailand and Japan, with more than 6.2 million downloads in
its first month of availability in the latter. As of May 2015, LINE's dedicated selfie camera app B612
has topped 50 million downloads worldwide, thanks to remarkable
user growth in both Asia and
Latin America. LINE also continues
to develop new LIFE Platform content and services, such as the
recently released LINE Lite, a smaller-than-1MB lightweight version
of the app that promises to make rich communication accessible even
to users in areas where network infrastructure is less developed or
lower-end smartphones are more widely used, thereby enabling LINE
to attract users from an even wider demographic globally.
Comment from Takeshi Idezawa, CEO of LINE Corporation:
"One of the key phrases for our 2015 business strategy is
'global expansion,' and as we have focused on seizing the leading
market share in countries around the world—particularly in Asia—our
full-scale localization efforts have recently shown the most
remarkable success in Indonesia.
As we continue our activities to ensure a leading position in
Indonesia, we will also apply the
user acquisition know how we have fostered there, as well as the
provision of LINE Lite and other services, to increase our market
share in new regions and accelerate our global
expansion."
Aspiring to become an integral platform for the everyday life of
all users through both current and new services, LINE will develop
a variety of new business models, establish new paths for growth,
and increase the convenience provided to its users, all while
moving at a faster rate and on a larger scale than ever before.
Note: This document has not been checked by a third party
auditor. All figures were calculated internally.
Press Contact:
Michiko Setsu
Phone: +81-70-5077-6073
Email: press@linecorp.com
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SOURCE LINE Corporation