Japanese messaging app Line raises over $1.1 billion in IPO

Line is to hit the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday and the Tokyo Stock Exchange on Friday.

That would put it on track to raise as much as $1.3B and value the company at ¥693B ($6.9B).

Line is offering 13 million new shares in the first section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange and 22 million shares in the New York Stock Exchange. Another 5.25 million shares will be sold through a greenshoe option, allowing it to increase the amount of stock sold. Nomura, JPMorgan Chase & Co, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs are the lead underwriters.

Line makes money from advertising and selling emoticons called “stamps” to use with messages.

Sales grew 40 percent previous year to 120.7 billion yen, with games, streaming music and comics accounting for 41 percent of that.

Line had an interesting start, with its beginnings during the time of the 2011 tsunami that struck Japan’s coast, devastating the region.

Since then, the company has rebranded itself and stretched its global footprint into about 230 different markets.

The deal comes on the heels of San Francisco cloud communications startup Twilio’s successful offering last month, which experts hoped would reinvigorate the lethargic IPO market. The Line shares will be offered to the public on Tuesday-Wednesday. It plans to use the proceeds to spearhead an expansion across Asia and eventually the U.S.

There will be a party in Times Square to celebrate the NYSE listing, according to a Line blog post.

The company is, impressively, ranked as the seventh most used messaging application globally. WeChat has more than 1.1 billion users. In Japan, the number of Line’s active users is larger than that of Facebook and Twitter, but the number of Line users otherwise has been dropping.

The app has a strong presence in Asian markets such as Thailand, Taiwan and Indonesia, as well as some Spanish-speaking nations, including Spain and Mexico. The company’s shares were up even higher Monday afternoon.