The dominant messaging app in Japan is known for its stickers, and soon, maybe an artificial intelligence named Clova.
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TOKYO — Imagine a world where everyone you know is on the same social network, sending direct messages to one another, sharing photos and making free phone calls.
And it’s not called Facebook.
In Japan, Thailand, Taiwan and Indonesia, that social network/messenger app is probably Line, an app that’s available in the United States and most other countries, but dominant in Asia, where over two-thirds of its audience is based.
At 214 million monthly active users, Line is dwarfed in size by the Facebook social network and the Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp chat applications, which each have over 1 billion users. It plans to build up market share in Asian countries — say in Korea and Vietnam, where it is behind local powerhouses — and then one day return to the United States.
Line had tried to expand to the U. S. in 2015 with celebrity endorsers like Taylor Swift and Paul McCartney, but it didn’ t find much success. “It just couldn’ t catch on here, ” says Tim Bajarin, an analyst with Creative Strategies. Chalk it up to Facebook and WhatsApp being so dominant. Google also has tried several times to launch a successful messenger app—most recently with Allo, but has found little success.
Yet Facebook has copied many of the chat app features popularized by Asian messaging apps, notably Line and China’s WeChat, such as stickers, games and e-commerce. Apple’s iMessage last year also hopped on the sticker craze.
This summer, Line says it will go further than its larger rivals by adding a personal digital assistant, Line’s version of Siri, Cortana and Alexa, to the app, in the Asian version of the software.
“We think we are ahead of the curve, and what is happening here will soon be happening in other regions, ” Line CEO Takeshi Idezawa told USA TODAY.
The plan is to launch Clova in Japan and Korea, and eventually roll out to other countries. Via the personal assistant “everything will converge and Clova will be in the middle, closing the distance between the user and everything else, ” he says.
Line currently offers free video and voice calling, social games, music streaming, ride-hailing taxi service, payments, a business communication tool (like Slack) and even fortune telling. But what Line is best known for are its colorful stickers, a way to augment and personalize the 22 billion text messages sent via the app.
#TalkingTech recently stopped by the colorful Line offices here when we were in Tokyo. The offices are in the heart of the bustling Shinjuku district, home to many of the tallest office buildings in the city, the busiest railway stop and a top site for evening entertainment.
The Line staff had recently moved here, and the offices were lined up with hundreds of bouquets, a traditional greeting from vendors, as well as framed portraits of and stuffed animals and characters from the Line collection. A big, life-size Brown Bear, the Line mascot, welcomes visitors, along with Cony the bunny. While perks for the staff include gaming areas, there’s also a quiet spot by the window to remove shoes and meditate.
Idezawa doesn’ t mind the competition from the U. S. tech giants. “It helps us…to keep innovating as we can’t rest on our laurels, ” he says.
Line will also open a store in New York City this summer, as a way of keeping a presence there beyond its 2016 New York Stock Exchange listing .
The subsidiary of South Korea-based search engine Naver raised over $1 billion on the public markets from the IPO, and the stock started strong, selling for $42 a share. It’s since fallen to the low $30s.
