There can be no discussion that in Japan, LINE is the king of chat apps at the moment. Maker NHN Japan, which now operates the service under a new company called LINE Corp., should be announcing 50 million domestic users very soon.
If there is one competitor, it’s certainly Korean chat app KakaoTalk, which entered a joint venture with Japan’s biggest web company Yahoo Japan in October last year.
And (like LINE) it switched on TV advertising to mass-acquire users (a very popular marketing tool for app operators in Japan) in December.
It seems cross-promotion and heavy TV advertising worked OK: operator Kakao Japan now says that the number of downloads for KakaoTalk in Japan passed the 10 million mark on March 24. For context, the global user base for the app currently stands at 82 million.
In terms of games, it’s worth noting that Kakao Japan opened an in-app gaming platform back in November last year. The company later said that it plans to expand the catalog of KakaoTalk-powered games in Japan to 100 by the end of this year.
