Line's market value may exceed 1 trillion yen

According to Bloomberg, Japan's instant messaging application Line is working with Nomura Holdings and Morgan Stanley in the preparation for initial public offering (IPO), the earliest listing of Line For this year in November. In addition to being listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, Line also considers whether to list on the NYSE or the Nasdaq (4234.08, -3.12, -0.07%).

Line has not yet finalized the size of the fundraising, but market participants generally expected Line's market value may exceed 1 trillion yen (about 9.8 billion US dollars). Yasuhiro Yasujima, chief economist at Japanese research firm NLI Research, predicts app valuations will take into account Facebook's (GOOG) acquisition of WhatsApp for $ 19 billion this year as the most popular instant messaging in Japan Reaching 10 billion or even 20 billion U.S. dollars. After going public, Line needs to step up R & D and M & A spending and develop more services to maintain value.

Since its formal introduction to the market in 2011, Line has been booming. The company announced in April this year, the number of registered users has exceeded 400 million. Morihiro Mori, chief executive of Line, plans to reach 500 million to 600 million Line users by the end of this year and grow to at least 1 billion in 2015. In addition, Line is very good at "doing as the Romans do" to achieve service localization. In addition to the Asian market, Line's business has made great strides in Spain and started to enter the Latin American market. Although it is a free application, but Line still get a lot of revenue. Last year, Line contributed 34.3 billion yen (about 338 million U.S. dollars) in revenue to its parent company.

Some analysts said Line ready to market reflects the new wave of global mobile communications, but also can not help but think of whether WeChat will also be brewing in the near future separate listing. At present, weixin (microblogging), a company of Tencent, is among the best in the global instant messaging market with 349 million WeChat active subscribers in the first quarter. Earlier, the market had heard WeChat or choose to list in Singapore news.