Ahead of Snap’s eagerly-awaited IPO, Line, one of the U. S. tech IPO highlights of 2016, has doubled down on sister service and Snapchat clone Snow. Line..
Ahead of Snap’s eagerly-awaited IPO , Line, one of the U. S. tech IPO highlights of 2016, has doubled down on sister service and Snapchat clone Snow.
Line and Snow both share the same parent company — Naver — but the two firms have increasingly become financially entwined. Line bought up 25 percent of Snow last September for $45 million , and now it is nearly doubling its equity to 48.6 percent, according to a filing. Line didn’t reveal the valuation of the stake, but a Naver representative did confirm that it was calculated by a third party auditor.
Line went public in a dual U. S.-Japan IPO that raised $1.1 billion. Shares initially popped 50 percent on the firm’s Tokyo debut, but there’s been little to celebrate since then. Line saw user numbers dip for the first time in January — despite a record year of revenue in 2016 — while its userbase increasingly limited to four countries: Japan, Indonesia, Taiwan and Thailand.
