SoftBank in talks with Naver over control of Line operator LY

TOKYO/SEOUL : SoftBank CEO Junichi Miyakawa said on Thursday that the Eastern telecommunications agency is in talks with South Korea’s Naver over management of LY Corp, which operates the appreciated messaging app Line.

Naver said final week that “very extraordinary” administrative guidance from the Eastern govt over a records leak final year required it to lower its management of LY Corp, which is majority owned by a joint mission between SoftBank and Naver.

LY Corp admitted in November final year that there had been unauthorised win admission to of its programs by a third birthday party by technique of Naver’s cloud diagram. This ended in the leak of the non-public records files of bigger than 300,000 Line customers and others.

Even supposing the guidance from Japan’s internal affairs and communications ministry about the records leak did not explicitly level out a promote-down, it did enlighten LY Corp to “overview the relationship where the outsourced firm has a major stage of capital management” relating to Naver.

LY Corp is additionally terminating outsourcing to Naver in response to Japan’s guidance, SoftBank said in a presentation.

South Korea’s govt said final month it is consulting with Naver and there ought to indifferent be no discriminatory measures in opposition to Korean companies. Historic tensions had ended in alternate disputes between Japan and South Korea from 2019 till final year, however the unique administrations are mending ties.

Japan lifted export curbs on high-tech materials to South Korea in March 2023 and South Korea’s alternate minister met his Eastern counterpart for the main time in six years final month.

After merging Line with Yahoo Japan in 2019, Naver and SoftBank now save 50 per cent each and every in the joint mission which controls LY Corp, through a 65 per cent stake, SoftBank documents portray.

LY Corp said on its web region that bigger than 95 million month-to-month active customers feeble Line in Japan as of March final year, and it had every other 83 million customers in Thailand, Taiwan, and Indonesia. Line used to be launched in 2011.

LY Corp’s market capitalization used to be about 2.77 trillion yen ($17.77 billion) on Thursday.

($1 = 155.8600 yen)