Japanese WeChat Line user growth stagnated, stopped at 200 million

According to Line's latest financial report, as of March 2017, Line's global monthly active users reached 214 million, which has been declining for two consecutive quarters and is 6 million fewer than the peak of 220 million in the third quarter of 2016.

The decline in the number of Line users is closely related to the aggressiveness of its competitors in non-dominant markets. Line's dominant markets are mainly concentrated in Japan, Thailand, Indonesia, Taiwan and other places. Due to the Matthew effect of social platforms, Line has given up direct competition with competitors in non-core markets and mainly focused on the four major markets mentioned above. In these four major markets, Line still maintains a certain user growth. In the first quarter, the monthly active users of Line's four core markets reached 171 million, a year-on-year increase of 12.6%, and the DAU/MAU ratio was 72%.

In the international market, Line mainly competes with multiple applications under Facebook. Like Facebook, Line cannot be used in China, but Line's camera applications such as Snow and B612 are very popular among Chinese users and are a strong competitor of Meitu.

Like Tencent, Line has also developed diversified business operations around the Line social platform. This is the strategy that Line calls the smart portal, which mainly includes news, video and content services.

In the first quarter, LINE's news service already had 150 million monthly active users.

Line's revenue in the first quarter was 39.26 billion yen, a year-on-year increase of 15%. Revenue mainly comes from advertising, emoticons, content payment and peripheral sales, and the share of revenue from advertising is increasing. Currently, the Japanese market is still Line's largest source of income.