Yahoo Japan Invests In Kakao Talk Japan For 50% Share / ITmedia

Yahoo Japan announced on October 19th to invest in Kako Japan which runs KAKAO TALK, messenger app for smartphone. Both jointly provides services around KAKAO TALK and others.

Yahoo Japan acquires 50% for allocation of new shares of Kakao Japan, which was 100% owned by KAKAO Corporation.  ...

KAKAO TALK has 65 million users as of the end of September around the world. A number of users in Japan is not disclosed.

ITmedia 10/19/2012 [jp]

memo

• LINE has similar number of users in the world as Kakao, but in Japan, LINE is much more popular with over 30 million users. Yahoo Japan is focusing on smartphone recently. It is very interesting to see if Kakao can catch up with LINE by the partnership in Japan.
• http://www.kakao.com/talk/ja