South Korea’s Naver’s Line app to list on Tokyo exchange by next summer at $8-$10 billion market value

October 25, 2013 Leave a comment

Line voice app developer plans to list on Tokyo exchange: Nikkei

4:03pm EDT

(Reuters) – The developer of the Line free voice calling and messaging app plans to list on the Tokyo Stock Exchange by next summer, the Nikkei said. Line Corp, owned by South Korea’s Naver Corp (035420.KS: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz), will have a market capitalization of 800 billion yen to 1 trillion yen ($8-$10 billion) when it goes public, the Japanese business daily said. The Line app was developed by employees at Naver’s Japanese subsidiary who were forced to turn to the Internet to contact each other after the massive earthquake and tsunami in March 2011 that disrupted phone lines across the country. The Line app’s user base has grown to more than 270 million worldwide, the daily said. The company is expected use the proceeds on advertising and the development of new apps, the business daily said.

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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