NHN’s Line App Passes 40 Million Users in 1 Year, Looks to Grow as Platform

Line, 40 million users (click to enlarge)

NHN Japan has announced today that it has passed yet another impressive user milestone, now with 40 million users worldwide. The popular VoIP calling and messaging application has been recently growing at a rate of five million new users per month [1], as you can see in the chart on the right.

It’s interesting to see how well the application is doing in countries other than Japan, where it has 18 million of its 40 million users.

Riding on its sudden wave of popularity, NHN Japan is now pushing Line as a platform from which to launch other services. We’ve already told you about Line Camera (see our review here) which NHN says received 6.5 million downloads in its first month. But in addition to that, the company also has its Sticker Shop within the Line app, which launched back on April 26 allowing users to buy (you guessed it!) stickers. As you can see below, those in-app purchases helped bring Line into the top grossing app charts in Japan over the past month.

In the company’s announcement for today’s milestone, executive Jun Masuda noted:

[W]e see this as a great opportunity to start a full-fledged development of LINE as a platform for other additional services, as we have been planning from the very beginning. With the aim in mind of acquiring 100 million users during 2012, we will keep improving the user-friendliness of our services, as well as offering our services on multiple devices with multilingual support, with the intention of developing LINE as a platform which caters to all users worldwide

I’m not sure how long Line can sustain its current level of growth, and 100 million users by year’s end is indeed a lofty goal. But if Line can continue to roll out more interesting services and create more buzz among its current user base, then it might be a reachable target.

Line app rankings, Japan app store