Line Corporation

• 1. Introduction

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  Line Corporation, the company behind one of Asia's most widely used messaging apps, began its life not as a chat platform but as a gaming hub. On the 4th of September 2000, it opened its doors as Hangame Japan, a subsidiary of a South Korean online game community. Few would have predicted that this modest gaming outpost would one day list simultaneously on the New York Stock Exchange and the Tokyo Stock Exchange, or that it would one day sit at the center of a billion-dollar merger designed to take on Google, Amazon, and Alibaba at once.

  How did a Japanese arm of a Korean games company transform into a messaging giant? What corporate reshuffles, mergers, and renamings did it pass through along the way? And what finally became of Line Corporation after two decades of independent operation?

• 2. From Gaming to Messaging

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  Hangame Japan was the Japanese face of Hangame, a South Korean game company owned by NHN Corporation. In August 2003, the company quietly changed its name to NHN Japan, keeping the Korean parent's initials in place. For the better part of a decade it operated under that identity, developing internet services while remaining a subsidiary of its overseas owner.

  The situation grew more complex in 2007, when Naver established a separate Japanese subsidiary called Naver Japan, tasked with running the Naver search engine in Japan. That search engine eventually shut down, but Naver Japan remained active long enough to acquire Livedoor in 2010. By 2012, Naver had folded three overlapping entities, NHN Japan, Naver Japan, and Livedoor, into a single reorganized NHN Japan. The consolidation cleared the way for a cleaner identity, and on the 1st of April 2013, the company adopted the name Line Corporation, taking its brand from the messaging app that had become its signature product.

• 3. Going Public

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  In July 2016, Line Corporation achieved a milestone that few tech companies manage: a simultaneous IPO on both the New York Stock Exchange and the Tokyo Stock Exchange. Listing on two major exchanges in different hemispheres at once signaled the company's ambition to be recognized as a genuinely international player, not merely a regional app maker.

  The dual listing also marked the high point of Line's life as an independent public company. Within four years, the calculus would shift dramatically. In late December 2020, Line delisted from both exchanges, withdrawing ahead of an absorption-type merger agreement with Z Holdings. The company that had rung the bell in New York and Tokyo was preparing to disappear into a larger structure.

• 4. The Yahoo Japan Merger

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  Preparations for the Yahoo Japan merger began in 2019, when Line Corporation was reorganized into a holding company and renamed Line Split Preparation Corporation. The operational business was then transferred to a second entity, which in 2021 took the Line Corporation name as its own, sometimes referred to as the second-generation Line Corporation. The original entity, meanwhile, was renamed A Holdings Corporation.

  In March 2021, the restructured Line Corporation formally merged with Yahoo Japan, which had been operated by Z Holdings, itself a SoftBank Group subsidiary. The resulting ownership structure paired old rivals as equals: Naver Corporation and SoftBank Corporation each held 50% stakes in A Holdings Corporation, which in turn held a majority stake in Z Holdings. Z Holdings would now operate both Line and Yahoo Japan under one roof.

  The strategic rationale was explicit. The merged company wanted to compete directly with U.S. tech giants including Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple, as well as Chinese counterparts Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent, and Japan's own e-commerce leader Rakuten. The union also brought Z Holdings into three markets where Line had built a substantial following: Taiwan, Thailand, and Indonesia.

  One month after the merger closed, in April 2021, Line launched Line Bank, a commercial bank headquartered in Taipei.

• 5. Absorbed into LY Corporation

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  On the 2nd of February 2023, Z Holdings announced that it planned to absorb its two main subsidiaries, Line and Yahoo Japan, into itself during fiscal year 2023. The consolidation moved forward on October 1 of that year. Yahoo, Z Entertainment, and Z Data all merged into Z Holdings, which then adopted a new name: LY Corporation.

  Line Corporation's assets, rights, and businesses were transferred to LY Corporation through an absorption-type split, with certain overseas stocks excluded from the transfer. After handing over its operations, Line Corporation changed its name once more, leaving behind the brand it had carried since 2013. The renamed entity was expected to function as a holding company, managing stakes in overseas subsidiaries rather than running consumer services directly.

• 6. What Line Became

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  Across its operational life, Line Corporation ran a portfolio of internet services built around the Line messaging app at its center. Alongside the core communication platform, the company developed Line Music for streaming, Line Manga for digital comics, and Line Pay as a payments service.

  The services that carried the Line name did not disappear when the corporate entity was absorbed; they passed to LY Corporation, which inherited the task of running them. The trajectory from a Korean gaming subsidiary in 2000 to a holding company managing overseas assets in 2023 is a story of successive reinventions, each one prompted by a shift in ownership rather than a change in the products themselves. The messaging app that gave the final iteration of Line Corporation its name now lives inside a structure designed, at least in part, to challenge the largest technology companies in the world, including those based in Taiwan, Thailand, and Indonesia, the three markets the Yahoo Japan merger specifically added to the group.