14 DAY TRIAL // On Tuesday, Japanese messaging service LINE Corporation officially announced that it managed to top the 400 million registered users mark as of April 1, 2014.
The application, which offers free call and messaging capabilities to all of its users, is currently available for the owners of devices running under major mobile operating systems out there, including Android and Windows Phone.
LINE managed to achieve this milestone in less than three years since its official release on June 23, 2011. Starting then, the service has turned into one of the most popular global communications products out there, the company notes.
Moreover, the company announced that it managed to add the last 100 million users in less than five months. The service topped 300 million registered users on November 11, 2013.
The app’s user base has seen great growth in North America and Europe in the meantime. Previously, the service was very popular in markets such as Spain, Southeast Asia, and other areas.
Additionally, the company announced that, at the time, it was seeing over 1.7 new users accessing the service each day all around the world.
“This trend has continued and just 4 months after the last milestone of 300 million users, the amount of LINE users worldwide surpassed 400 million on April 1,” LINE announced.
“Since the start of the new year the amount of countries with over 10 million registered users rose to a total of 10, including America, Korea, Malaysia, and Mexico.”
At the same time, LINE notes that there has been a significant increase in communication made via its service, with over 10 billion chat messages being sent each day and 1.8 billion daily sticker messages. LINE users are also making over 12 million calls each day, the company says.
Another new feature in the app is the LINE Creators Market, which provides people with the possibility to create and sell their own original stickers.
According to LINE, the growth it has seen lately is expected to allow it to further grow as a smartphone communications infrastructure and to become a smartphone platform.
“One of our goals for 2014 was to reach over 500 million users and today we’ve been able reach the milestone of 400 million. I’d like to thank all our users and supporters for their help so far,” Akira Morikawa, CEO of LINE Corporation, said.
“Along with the rapid proliferation of smartphones, the level of competition in the global communications app market has become fiercer than ever, and is only intensifying every day. We believe that this shows that messaging services have become the crux of our mobile society, and demonstrates their incredible worth.”