Abstract

LINE started their journey by facilitating people’s communication in Japan after facing the tragic event in Tohoku region in March 2011. It has reached 1.5 million users in 1.5 years and 200 million users in 2 years thanks to their expressive and supersized emoji which are extremely popular in Japan. It has become the most popular application in Japan, Taiwan, Thailand and Indonesia. After initiating their operations in 2011 LINE was having major success from their early beginnings by providing a fast, free and reliable service. After establishing themselves in the messaging app community they have expanded to other services such as for making payments, finding jobs, renting/buying apartments, reading manga, playing online game, and for calling the taxi. All of these new services and goals that we have seen in the past years have became more obvious since Takeshi Idezawa took over as a CEO in April 2015. His vision is to make significant transformation from a Japanese Service to a global service, also making Line app from a messenger service to a life platform. Interested to raise visibility of Line’s brand, characters and expand its business in other countries, by establishing LINE’s retail stores in major cities. LINE major streams of business are Advertisement, Games and Stickers. In this case we can see the difference between Takeshi Idezawa’s leadership which is a Visionary in these circumstances, and Akira Morikawa’s style which is creative. Morikawa helped LINE to be created and Idezawa has been able to expand this project to a higher ground. LINE recently has passed the number of users cross 600 million. Line has roughly 218 million monthly unique users, it’s still shadowed by more established competitors like WhatsApp with 1 billion monthly active users and Facebook with 2.07 million active monthly users.

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