KARACHI: With an objective to become the world’s largest life platform, the Korean mobile social application LINE has formally entered the Pakistani market, which the officials see as “a goldmine”.
“The response from Pakistan is in multiple folds of what the headquarters was expecting; they think of Pakistan as a goldmine,” LINE’s country lead for Pakistan Bilal Farrukh told a group of journalists at the Pearl Continental Hotel on Tuesday.
In his first ever interaction, LINE’s country head briefed the media about the company’s global strategy and the role Pakistan can play as a market.
“Our strategy for Pakistan is to make a strong footprint and become the number one mobile social platform in the country,” Farrukh said. He however, refused to disclose LINE’s user base for the country.
“We have been in Pakistan for only six months,” he said, admitting the numbers are not really big.
The country lead, however, says the growth of LINE users is impressive and their global team has very positive expectations from Pakistan.
The company started marketing its products in August, marking its official launch in the country. The move seems to be part of a global strategy to build “a huge worldwide user base” and eventually take on mobile messaging service WhatsApp – which was acquired by social networking giant Facebook for a whopping $19 billion earlier this year.
A three-year-old startup, LINE was originally developed in Japan after the country was hit by Tsunami, which destroyed its communication system. The purpose of the app was to provide Japanese with a platform to communicate with each other on immediate basis. However, the app became so popular over time that founders had to develop it further and finally turned it into a company, now headquartered in South Korea.
With its 560 million users worldwide, LINE is fast catching up with WhatsApp that has 600 million users globally. However, a bulk of LINE’s users comes from far eastern nations. The company earned $340 million in 2013 revenues, according to Farrukh.
LINE offers free text and voice messaging, voice and video calling and group chat services to users, Farrukh said during the product’s demonstration.
LINE’s special features include stickers chat, a social timeline and official accounts. From the latest Firefox operating system to the basic Nokia Asha platform, the app can be used on all mobile platforms, not just iPhone and Android, he said. “It is also available on desktop computers,” he added.
The company is developing several new features and adding them to LINE, Farrukh said. In fact, when it launched locally, it developed stickers for local consumers and even incorporated the Urdu language, he said.
Though LINE has several revenue streams, such as paid stickers, its own games and in app purchases and official accounts, its focus in Pakistan is not on paid content, Farrukh said, adding some of its paid content is not even open to Pakistani consumers.
“We are currently concerned about increasing our global user base, increasing LINE users and earning number one spot in the country will stimulate our user growth globally,” said the country lead.
Published in The Express Tribune, November 20th, 2014.
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