Yahoo Japan and Line Announce To Merge

On 18 Nov 2019, Japanese telco SoftBank Corp announced a plan to merge its internet unit Yahoo Japan with Line Corp, the messaging app operator as to unite against other internet giants. As per the statement from SoftBank, it said that Yahoo Japan, name changed to Z Holdings last month will complete the deal of merger with Line by October 2020.

“This will be a very big headache and threat to the players like NTT Docomo and Rakuten,” said Seijiro Takeshita, from the University of Shizuoka.

In Japan, Yahoo Japan is the biggest search engine within the country. And Line is the country’s main messaging app.

Mr Takeshita said further, “I think there will be a lot of game-changing issues that will go on.”

What May Happen After the Merger

Yahoo is the major search engine in Japan While Google is the predominant search engine in the US and Europe. Each month, there’s more than 50 million people visit Yahoo Japan’s website. Yahoo Japan is no longer linked to its US in 2018.

On the other side, Line, under South Korean company Naver, has approximately 80 million users in Japan a similar number of which is in Southeast Asia and Taiwan market. The app Line is famous for its cartoon stickers.

Yahoo Japan’s parent company, Softbank, has invested billions dollars on Asian-based tech companies to make it a dominant player in the payments market in Japan in recent years. Softbank has already had its own payment service PayPay.

In this merger big deal, Yahoo Japan will scoop up Linepay, which is broadly used by many competitors.

Just as said by Mr Takeshita, the market will have a significant change.