The Line App: will stickers also be flooding Europe?
Big things are happening beyond the borders of our small European continent, things which will find their way here sooner or later. The Line application which is designed to offer free messaging, calls and sharing of multimedia content is certainly one of these things. For the time being however, our market is of no great interest to the Japanese company as it is focusing on strengthening the Asian market. But it certainly does have plans to expand outside of Asia.
Japan, Taiwan and Thailand are the main markets on which Line operates. Rather than starting a fight with its competition such as Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp, Line is focusing on the region of the Middle East and specifically on Malaysia and Indonesia where acceptance of smartphones is still underway. The core of the luxury Line application is constituted by games, interactive video calls and the ever more popular stickers.
Emoticons are no longer enough for anyone
Gone are the days when the regular emoticon was enough to express our emotions. Line has 218 million users who are willing to pay for luxury games and more and more new stickers. And Asian users are willing to pay a lot for stickers of popular and famous film or comic characters. Line knows that and is constantly developing ever newer motifs for them. Most messages are thus often made up of more pictures than text. Just to give you an idea: over 1 billion stickers are sent every day all over the world (this figure does not include only Line, but all applications).
Luxury video chat which is out of this world
You can modify the perfect video chat in any way you want via the Line application with the aid of templates. You can be an astronaut flying through space or a wild animal. You can choose the backdrop of a luxury hotel or find yourself on a deserted beach.
Line erases generational differences
Line is usually compared with the SnapChat application which is very popular among teenagers in the USA. There is however one small difference here. Line is not used by teenagers alone. In Asia, it is gradually becoming an application designed for a wider population group. And this is precisely what could pose a threat, for example to Messenger and WhatsApp in our country.
In addition to that, the company is aiming for the application to support conference calls for up to 200 people. And that really is a major competitive advantage.
