Social network company Line is set to unveil its long-awaited IPO plan in New York and Tokyo on June 10, according to Reuters. The dual listing looks set to value the messaging app at somewhere between US$2 billion and US$3 billion.
Line will then take orders from institutional investors in the week of June 13, with the IPO priced the same week or by the end of the month, says Reuters.
Rumors of Line’s IPO have been rumbling on for nearly three years. The first estimation was a US$10 billion valuation, with that process reportedly cancelled in September 2014. The chat app’s failure to grow its user base in 2015 seems to have led to ever smaller evaluations of what Japan-based Line Corp is worth.
Line CEO Takeshi Idezawa (left), pictured onstage at TIA Singapore in April.
The app now has 218.4 million monthly active users (MAUs), but it’s dwarfed by WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. Line added only 13 million new MAUs in the previous 12 months.
Despite those concerns, Line could see one of the biggest tech IPOs of 2016 – though it doesn’t look like there’ll be many this year. There’s only been one so far – a cyber security firm called SecureWorks, which is a spin-off from Dell. Twilio, a cloud software company, will likely be the next.
Editing by David Corbin
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