Strong Q1 results as Line metamorphoses from messenger to lifestyle service

Line Corporation, the company behind Japan’s blockbuster messaging app Line, today announced its earnings report for the first quarter of 2015. Total revenue for January-March was JPY 28.1 billion (US$236 million), a 70 percent increase from the same quarter last year and a 9 percent uptick quarter-on-quarter. The Line app itself accounted for JPY 25.4 billion (US$214 million) of that figure, representing a 76 percent increase over the same quarter in 2014 and a 9 percent bump from last quarter.

Monthly active users (MAUs) as of March 2015 now total 205 million, up from the 181 million MAUs reported in January. 123 million of those users hail from Line’s top four markets – Japan, Taiwan, Thailand, and Indonesia – compared to 91 million in January.

With Line already the top messenger in Japan, Taiwan, and Thailand, a sizable chunk of those 32 million additional MAUs likely hail from Indonesia – where Line reported a “rapid acceleration of user growth.” That’s potentially bad news for WhatsApp, the current market leader in Indonesia.

Line reported strong sales in its sticker business, with new stickers that play sounds being “particularly well-received […] outpacing initial projections.” User-made stickers from Line’s Creators Market reached the 100,000-set milestone ahead of the store’s first anniversary next month. The company said it would focus on growing the sticker service in Thailand and Taiwan, specifically.

On the gaming front, Line Game released 10 new titles in the first quarter of 2015. Line Bubble 2 attracted 1.4 million pre-registrations, a new record for the company, and the popular Disney Tsum Tsum title surpassed 40 million total downloads in February on strong performance in the US, Thailand, and Taiwan.

Since last summer, the company has been hard at work transforming itself into an all-encompassing lifestyle platform, even going so far as to execute a CEO shuffle earlier this month. Several of these new services have already launched in 2015, including video distribution service Line TV (Thailand, Taiwan), ecommerce store Line Mart (Taiwan), taxi service Line Taxi (Japan), food delivery service Line Wow (Japan), and part-time job finder Line Baito (Japan).

Takeshi Idezawa, Line Corporation’s CEO, said the following in a statement:

Last year, we decided to expand beyond a simple messenger app. Under this strategy we launched multiple new services in 2014, and we have repeated this success in the first quarter of 2015. These new services in 2015 are off to a strong start, winning the support of even more users than we initially projected at the start of the year. We will build on these early successes and expand these services so that they can become the market leader in their respective categories.