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Chief Strategy and Marketing officer  also explained how the company plans to take over Southeast Asia

After enjoying the largest tech IPO of the year in July, Japanese social networking and messaging company LINE will be using the funds raised to focus on further enhancing its news and media platform.

This according to Jun Masuda, the Chief Strategy & Marketing Officer at LINE, speaking at B Dash Camp 2016 today.

“There are some major [developments] about this, the content and media portion. The biggest growth we’ve seen is LINE news. With the teenagers and twenty-somethings, we are very close to Yahoo,” he said.

“So this is the area that we are going to continue to focus. The core business is the media strategy. Our news and some things we hope to derive from news.”

Masuda acknowledged the company lacks a news platform on a traditional website, and hinted towards potential partnerships to build up that infrastructure.

“If you look at the entire picture, because we fundraised JPY100 billion (US$960 million), which is going to be used for our growth…[But the more important question is] what do we need to do to stay being very LINE-like?” he said.

Also Read: [Updated] Line Corp goes public in Tokyo, surging nearly 50 per cent above IPO price

To highlight this, Masuda pointed towards a new challenge facing the company — now that LINE has a significant penetration rate, people may flee to away from a ‘mainstream’ service and start to pick-up smaller, more niche messaging services (Telegram comes to mind).

“How are we going to adapt to that? So the most scary thing for us is to not become rigid. The strength that drove us to this stage can actually turn into our weakness….How can we stay flexible, take on challenges. And even more now because we are an IPO company,” he said.

There is some concrete evidence from recent moves that might provide some insight into how the company hopes to attract new users.

In September, the company invested US$45 million into Snow — a Snap-like company that focusses heavily on the filter feature. Snow and LINE were both developed by Naver Corporation, a South Korean Internet services giant.

Also in September, the company made a heavy push towards becoming king of the chatbot by introducing enhanced APIs for developers.

LINE’s focus on Thailand and Indonesia

Masuda said the company has named Thailand and Indonesia as its prime focus in Southeast Asia — although he made a point to say it does not mean LINE does not have plans in other nations.

The service is very popular in both Thailand and Indonesia, and it is working towards grabbing more market share across the region.

LINE is dominating in Thailand and the country has become an important market for the messaging service.

Also Read: Japan’s Septeni Holdings acquires KL-based digital marketing agency Lion & Lion

But for Indonesia, the company is making a push to become the top messaging service in Southeast Asia’s largest country (it lags behind Blackberry Messenger). Masuda said this does not necessarily mean a heavy ad push, but rather turning LINE into an app people use for their day-to-day business.

“What we want to become is a commodity or something essential in the everyday life of Indonesian people,” he said.

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