Line, the Japan-based messenger service owned by Korea-headquartered internet company Naver, set the range of its initial public offering at ¥2,700 to ¥3,200, or $26.50 to $31.50 per share yesterday.
The company will offer 22 million shares in New York on July 14 and a further 13 million shares in Tokyo the next day, potentially raising up to $1.1bn, slightly above the $1.05bn target size that Line was aiming for earlier this month.
Line has arranged an over-allotment option of 5.25 million shares. If the company floats at the top of its range and sells all additional green-shoe shares, it would secure more than $1.25bn in proceeds. It plans to set the final IPO price on July 11.
Line is a spinout of Naver, having been founded in 2000 under the name Hangame Japan Corporation. It was renamed Line Corporation in 2013, after the name of its key product, a messaging app perhaps best known for letting users send digital stickers to each other.
The app is hugely popular in Japan, dominates the market in Thailand and Taiwan, and is growing in Indonesia, but its 218 million-strong userbase is dwarfed by internet company Facebook’s two rival products, Messenger and WhatsApp, which count 900 million and one billion users, respectively.
Line first filed for an IPO in Tokyo in 2014 but later delayed the flotation until the following year. In August 2015, it decided to postpone the offering yet again until at least spring 2016.
Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and Nomura are managing the initial public offering.