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Boasting 6M downloads, Mixi brings Monster Strike to Taiwan

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Yesterday we told you about Mixi’s investment in Taiwanese recruitment site Job178. It turns out that this was not the company’s only recent activity in Taiwan, as it has also just launched a localized version of its hit mobile game Monster Strike. The Chinese name for the game is Guàiwu Dànzhū (or ‘Monster Marbles’) and currently it’s only available on Android, but an iOS version will be coming soon. Mixi is partnering with So-net Entertainment Taiwan to launch and market the game in the region. A Monster Strike homepage has been launched at monster-strike.com.tw along with a ‘how to’ page for new users. Interestingly the company is calling this its first overseas deployment of Monster Strike, so I’m going to interpret that as an indication that Mixi’s efforts to bring Monster Strike to mainland China via a partnership with Tencent have not yet come to fruition yet. I expect that perhaps Taiwan is a dry run of sorts before launching the game on the mainland. Mixi has also announced that Monster Strike now has accumulated over six million downloads. We figure that this is still largely due to heavy TV advertising here in Japan, as we mentioned back in April.

monster-strike-taiwan

Yesterday we told you about Mixi’s investment in Taiwanese recruitment site Job178. It turns out that this was not the company’s only recent activity in Taiwan, as it has also just launched a localized version of its hit mobile game Monster Strike. The Chinese name for the game is Guàiwu Dànzhū (or ‘Monster Marbles’) and currently it’s only available on Android, but an iOS version will be coming soon.

Mixi is partnering with So-net Entertainment Taiwan to launch and market the game in the region. A Monster Strike homepage has been launched at monster-strike.com.tw along with a ‘how to’ page for new users.

Interestingly the company is calling this its first overseas deployment of Monster Strike, so I’m going to interpret that as an indication that Mixi’s efforts to bring Monster Strike to mainland China via a partnership with Tencent have not yet come to fruition yet. I expect that perhaps Taiwan is a dry run of sorts before launching the game on the mainland.

Mixi has also announced that Monster Strike now has accumulated over six million downloads. We figure that this is still largely due to heavy TV advertising here in Japan, as we mentioned back in April.

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monst_tw_02 Screen Shot 2014-05-15 at 9.57.43 AM

Fun Chinese photo app boasts 70M users, all without any marketing

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MomentCam is one of the more unique photo effects applications that I’ve seen in a long time. Using just a photo of your face, it creates amazing faux hand-drawn portraits of you in a range of fun situations. The key to the process is the app’s facial recognition, which will usually place your eyes and mouth correctly before face-swapping your head onto many different designs. This process works best when you take the initial photo of your face from the front, because when you do so from the side, your ear or hair might get in the way of the processed composition. Currently there are are themed designs available including a set corresponding to the animals of the Chinese zodiac, but there are more available for download if you choose. The app also has a emoticon-creation function, turning your face into animated emoticons (like those below) that can be shared to various social networks or messaging apps (most based in China, since the company is based in Beijing). I managed to get a brief comment from the company’s co-founder Steven Huang about the success of their app so far. Amazingly, he claims that their progress to date has come without…

moment-cam

MomentCam is one of the more unique photo effects applications that I’ve seen in a long time. Using just a photo of your face, it creates amazing faux hand-drawn portraits of you in a range of fun situations.

The key to the process is the app’s facial recognition, which will usually place your eyes and mouth correctly before face-swapping your head onto many different designs. This process works best when you take the initial photo of your face from the front, because when you do so from the side, your ear or hair might get in the way of the processed composition.

Currently there are are themed designs available including a set corresponding to the animals of the Chinese zodiac, but there are more available for download if you choose.

The app also has a emoticon-creation function, turning your face into animated emoticons (like those below) that can be shared to various social networks or messaging apps (most based in China, since the company is based in Beijing).

momentcam

I managed to get a brief comment from the company’s co-founder Steven Huang about the success of their app so far. Amazingly, he claims that their progress to date has come without any active promotions on their part:

Our app [has grown] purely on word of mouth. No marketing at all. Our users have reached 70 million around the world since it was launched in the China market in early July and opened to world market on October 22. Our user base is 45% Chinese and 55% overseas users.

The company has reportedly raised 20 million RMB in series A funding, so it will be interesting to see where they take their app from here.

If you’re looking for a fun new avatar to start the year off fresh, I encourage you to check out MomentCam over on the App Store or on Google Play 1.


  1. I am a little puzzled as to why there are so many similar looking apps also by the name of MomentCam on Google Play. As far as I can tell from previous China-based reports, this one is the original. Although I’ve asked Steven about the duplicates and I await his reply.  ↩

This Chinese company built $120M per year business delivering ducks necks to geeks

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In China, duck necks are a popular food. And if you’re looking to find some, you might try the nearest Hahajing restaurant, a chain with over 1600 outlets in China. It’s main menu is duck meat, and even if you can’t visit the restaurant in person, the company prides itself on very fast delivery time, with food usually being delivered within 30 minutes. Hahajing opened just four years ago, but its annual sales amount to 700 million yuan (or about $120 million). As a comparison, Japan’s highest-grossing pizza chain, Pizza-La, has 535 outlets, and the company took 20 years to achieve 57 billion yen ($560 million) in the total annual sales, and that’s including the sales from its restaurant business. When you compare these two, it’s easy to see why speed of Hanhanjing growth is so impressive. We should clarify that you aren’t likely to see many people eating duck necks when you visit China. The company says that their main demographic/target is (for lack of a better word) geeks, or those who prefer to stay at home or in their room during the weekend. If you’d like to learn more about Hahajing, you can check out their website and…

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In China, duck necks are a popular food. And if you’re looking to find some, you might try the nearest Hahajing restaurant, a chain with over 1600 outlets in China. It’s main menu is duck meat, and even if you can’t visit the restaurant in person, the company prides itself on very fast delivery time, with food usually being delivered within 30 minutes.

Hahajing opened just four years ago, but its annual sales amount to 700 million yuan (or about $120 million).

As a comparison, Japan’s highest-grossing pizza chain, Pizza-La, has 535 outlets, and the company took 20 years to achieve 57 billion yen ($560 million) in the total annual sales, and that’s including the sales from its restaurant business. When you compare these two, it’s easy to see why speed of Hanhanjing growth is so impressive.

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Hahajing restaurant (photo hd55.cn)

We should clarify that you aren’t likely to see many people eating duck necks when you visit China. The company says that their main demographic/target is (for lack of a better word) geeks, or those who prefer to stay at home or in their room during the weekend.

If you’d like to learn more about Hahajing, you can check out their website and order page for more details. Or if you think you might be a frequent customer, you can also check out their iOS and Android apps for duck necks on the go should you ever need them.

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WWDC just not the same with ducks necks, packaged in foreground. (from Weibo user @xbxbxbb)

Chinese online flower shop forces men to choose their favorite girl

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Based on our previous article, in Japanese China is very good at finding business opportunities among the year’s many holidays. Valentine’s Day on February 14th, and Qixi Festival (often referred to as China’s Valentine’s Day), are both good examples of this. But China has one romantic service that you can use at any time of year, including Valentine’s Day. It’s online flower store RoseOnly, which we previously featured on our Japanese site. The online service began in January of 2013, selling roses for 1000 yuan (about $170), a price point that seems to be targeting the upper class. After a user places an order and enters the recipient’s information, a nice-looking guy delivers the roses in a BMW. Very impressive. But there is one very unique part of this service that stands out. When a male user signs up on the site, he has to register with his national identification card and he cannot specify more than one woman as a recipient – nor can he change the recipient at a later date. So if a man has a relationship with more than one woman, he cannot use the service for both. He would have to make a choice. Even…

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Based on our previous article, in Japanese

China is very good at finding business opportunities among the year’s many holidays. Valentine’s Day on February 14th, and Qixi Festival (often referred to as China’s Valentine’s Day), are both good examples of this. But China has one romantic service that you can use at any time of year, including Valentine’s Day. It’s online flower store RoseOnly, which we previously featured on our Japanese site.

The online service began in January of 2013, selling roses for 1000 yuan (about $170), a price point that seems to be targeting the upper class. After a user places an order and enters the recipient’s information, a nice-looking guy delivers the roses in a BMW. Very impressive.

But there is one very unique part of this service that stands out. When a male user signs up on the site, he has to register with his national identification card and he cannot specify more than one woman as a recipient – nor can he change the recipient at a later date.

So if a man has a relationship with more than one woman, he cannot use the service for both. He would have to make a choice. Even after a user breaks up with his girlfriend, he cannot send RoseOnly roses to a new girlfriend. In a way, that makes them extra special for anyone who receives them.

On Chinese Valentine’s Day, the sales on RoseOnly reached 11 million yuan ($1.8 million). Approximately 11,000 men sent roses using the service. And this success led the company to raise $10 million from Tencent in its series B round, and they opened their first brick-and-mortar stores in September.

The company says that it plans to launch a new service for men to send chocolates to women. I am sure that they are targeting for February 14th with this initiative. For more information, you can check out the RoseOnly promo video below.

Inside Beijing’s startup scene: TechTemple nutures up-and-coming Chinese startups

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Beijing Skyline See the original article in Japanese from last month Among the eight startups who pitched at a recent event at Beijing’s Tech Temple, the following four startups provide all provide really interesting mobile solutions. Considering Xiaomi’s recent growth, and I came away with the impression that it could be Chinese startups like these that step to the fore on the the world stage. Appbyme AppByMe Appbyme is a cloud platform for the development smartphone apps, targeting beginner developers. In the US, there are similar services like as Invision and Flinto that help users prototype smartphone apps. Not just with prototyping, Appbyme helps users until they complete developing an app and even monetizing from that. In China, many people operate Bulletin Board Sites (BBSs) using content management systems like Discuz, PHPwind and WordPress. Those BBS already have regular users, and if their operators produce an app, then naturally that app can pick up quite a few users as well. And with Appbyme, such users can create an app simply by choosing a template. Many features such as push-notification, location-based gaming, social media sharing, or group-buying can be easily added to the app. Before founding Appbyme, CEO Zhao Jian worked…

beijing-skyline
Beijing Skyline

See the original article in Japanese from last month

Among the eight startups who pitched at a recent event at Beijing’s Tech Temple, the following four startups provide all provide really interesting mobile solutions. Considering Xiaomi’s recent growth, and I came away with the impression that it could be Chinese startups like these that step to the fore on the the world stage.

Appbyme

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AppByMe

Appbyme is a cloud platform for the development smartphone apps, targeting beginner developers. In the US, there are similar services like as Invision and Flinto that help users prototype smartphone apps. Not just with prototyping, Appbyme helps users until they complete developing an app and even monetizing from that.

In China, many people operate Bulletin Board Sites (BBSs) using content management systems like Discuz, PHPwind and WordPress. Those BBS already have regular users, and if their operators produce an app, then naturally that app can pick up quite a few users as well. And with Appbyme, such users can create an app simply by choosing a template. Many features such as push-notification, location-based gaming, social media sharing, or group-buying can be easily added to the app.

Zhao Jian, CEO of AppByMe

Before founding Appbyme, CEO Zhao Jian worked as the technical officer of Yicha, a mobile search engine in China. He feels that it is getting more difficult to search for content as more services assume the form of a mobile apps. His vision is to make a better structure for content search on mobiles.

In this field, there are competitors already out there in China like AppCan and Zhuixin. But when it comes to the number of users and apps, Appbyme stands out. To date, 5400 webmasters are registered on Appbyme, and more than 50,000 apps have been released. The business model is based on a revenue share with developers and advertisers, charging bigger developers for a subscription.

The BBS community in China is very active, especially in cities. According to Zhao, local portal sites are popular, and they have their own business potential, the kind you cannot see for sites in larger, central cities. Appbyme hopes to take advantage of such local opportunities.

The company also plans to make the English, Japanese, and Korean versions so that it can expand overseas.

SayHi!

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Sumatomo

SayHi is a worldwide dating app with daily active amounting to about 650,000. It has many users in Middle Eastern countries and in Asia as well. Even though the app is developed in China, the service is not being provided there.

On SayHi, users can find other users nearby through GPS and then chat with them. But you need points to chat other members. For example, when a male user wants to chat with a popular female user, he has to pay one point for an hour. If you become a VIP member for a 6000 yen monthly fee, you can chat as much as you want.

According to Shi Yan, the CEO of Easyroid, the company has apps on iOS, Android and Windows Mobile. He says that 29% of their sales comes from Japanese market.

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Shi Yan pitches SayHi

In China, there are other popular messenger apps with similar features, including Momo and iAround. Globally, Badoo and Skout are doing well. SayHi plans to add more entertainment and game features in the app in order to differentiate from competitors.

vWorld

vWorld’s CEO Gao Song once worked as the chief officer of Shangshuixuan Studio, the game department of Kingsoft (HKG:3888). Gao says that the number of smartphone users in China amounts to 354 million, and most are either students or white-collar workers. There are some common characteristics among them:

  • Since they literally grew up with games, they care much about the quality of games.
  • They are used to sharing content on social media.
  • They are keenly competitive.

vWorld is a game app where users compete to conquer actual places. It’s a bit different from Foursquare, where users become the mayor of a location by accumulating check-in points. On vWorld, one can become the leader of a location if they win a game against other users.

The company wants to create a user experience where once users conquer various locations in a city that they would actually be motivated to move on to a different city. The app uses GPS to find the actual location using Autonavi’s API.

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vWorld CEO, Gao Song

App Annie

App Annie is an analytics platform that tracks downloads of mobile apps, and it’s a service we frequently reference here at The Bridge. You can easily get statistical information about iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, and Mac apps, giving you a good idea of which apps are popular in which market, popular and which ones are earning revenue.

App Annie has its headquarters in Beijing, but according to CEO Bertrand Schmitt, the company has 130 staff spanning across six cities. In September of 2013, the company raised $15 million in its series C round from Sequoia Capital, IDG Capital Partners, Greycroft Partners and Infinity Venture Partners.

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App Annie CEO Bertrant Schmitt

Bertrant shared his insights into the recent trend of mobile apps in the world. For instance, while the iOS AppStore has been growing in China, Google Play has seen remarkable growth in the other BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia and India). When it comes to the revenue, the big money comes mostly from advanced countries, with Android doing especially well are in the US and Japan. For the Japanese market, sales on Android and iOS are relatively well balanced [1].

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App Annie Index

For app developers, if you don’t know how your apps are selling in certain markets, you cannot develop a strategy for your development and design. But by using the market data available on App Annie and by utilizing other growth hacking tools, developers can determine how to make a successful app much more efficiently than before.

App Annie publishes infographic overviews of some of their statistics.In this way, the site can attract future customers, offering more detailed data to user who pay for premium accounts. Many news media who struggle with monetization can learn much from this business model.


We will look at more Chinese startups in our next article, and examine some of the major internet trends among companies in China.

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Tech Temple

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Many people in the Beijng startup community get together at this party. The entrepreneurs and investors I often meet in Beijing were all there. Even though it was soon after the facility opened, the place seemed to be quite well known in Beijing already.

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The corner of the reception and the cafe. The coffee was incredible.

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TechTemple is on the first and the second floor of the Tianhai Business Building in Beixinqiao, Beijing.


  1. According to figures from September of 2013.  ↩

Chinese tech news site 36kr focuses on the little guys

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Here’s some fun trivia: 36 is the atomic number of Krypton, the home planet of Superman. And making a reference to that factoid in its name, is the Chinese-language tech site 36kr. It was initially launched by ChengCheng Liu (pictured below) and his friends at Peking University in 2012. Currently its editorial department has around fifty staff, and about 30 articles are released everyday. Five or six of those are typically startup-related articles. The site has approximately 20 million page views a month, with readers residing mostly in China or Chinese-speaking regions. And while other Chinese’s tech blogs cover overseas topics or news from big Chinese corporations like Tencent and Sina, 36Kr focuses on Chinese startups. The company has been organizing startup events every two months in many cities in China, the US and Hong Kong. On November 10th, an event in Hangzhou attracted 1400 participants, with about one in three of them being entrepreneurs. This past year the tech blog has covered more than 800 startups in total. In addition to publishing news articles, it has also been developing a startup database. The number of the registered startup projects is 15,000 to date, and it keeps adding about 50…

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36kr’s database

Here’s some fun trivia: 36 is the atomic number of Krypton, the home planet of Superman. And making a reference to that factoid in its name, is the Chinese-language tech site 36kr.

It was initially launched by ChengCheng Liu (pictured below) and his friends at Peking University in 2012. Currently its editorial department has around fifty staff, and about 30 articles are released everyday. Five or six of those are typically startup-related articles. The site has approximately 20 million page views a month, with readers residing mostly in China or Chinese-speaking regions. And while other Chinese’s tech blogs cover overseas topics or news from big Chinese corporations like Tencent and Sina, 36Kr focuses on Chinese startups.

ccliu_snapshot

The company has been organizing startup events every two months in many cities in China, the US and Hong Kong. On November 10th, an event in Hangzhou attracted 1400 participants, with about one in three of them being entrepreneurs.

This past year the tech blog has covered more than 800 startups in total. In addition to publishing news articles, it has also been developing a startup database. The number of the registered startup projects is 15,000 to date, and it keeps adding about 50 projects everyday.

He was a student at Peking University when he launched the site. Even without developing the database, the company has broke even thanks to its news site and events.

But he is taking a bit of a risk by putting resources into database development, with 20 of their 50 staffers tied up in that project. Liu explained:

What we aim to do with this database is not just to provide information on which startup fundraises from which VC. We aim to collect information about which investors are behind the VC, and eventually I hope it develops into a sort of LinkedIn for the startup community. […] By doing this, we will be able to predict the action of investors and entrepreneurs before fundraising occurs.

36kr tracks not only investment, but also which startups investors are interested in. Liu’s aim in developing the database is to build startup culture, rather than to profit from it. He plans to create a one-stop service that offers entrepreneurs access to important information, products, and a network – all the necessary things to launch a startup.

In a way, the concept is similar to Creww Marketplace or e27’s Bundles.

36kr has an entrepreneur knowledge exchange event coming up this week in Shenzhen, and you can learn more about that here.

Goyoo: Building a business on the popularity of internet cafes in China

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In China, you can find lots of internet cafes in just about any city. Even after broadband or mobile devices have been widely adopted, internet cafes still attract many people. One of the reasons behind this popularity is that students can enjoy games a little more freely without parents around to nag them. Well over 100,000 internet cafes exist in the country, and out of those, around 30,000 are i8 cafes, using a system developed by Goyoo. That means, there’s an i8 for every 10,000 people in China. Just as a comparison, Korea is famous for having many internet cafes, and there’s an internet cafe for every 2500 people. According to the CEO, Jerry Wang, Goyoo’s system consists of launcher software on the PCs, games, and routers and servers to to support their distribution system. The company operates an advertising network, AdPro, which serves advertisements to the monitors of the PCs in these cafes. That’s the main source of revenue for the company. The maximum impressions achieved in a single day is 150 million, and that came just after four months after the launch of AdPro. The difference between AdPro and the other existing ad networks is that it can…

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CEO Jerry Wang

In China, you can find lots of internet cafes in just about any city. Even after broadband or mobile devices have been widely adopted, internet cafes still attract many people. One of the reasons behind this popularity is that students can enjoy games a little more freely without parents around to nag them. Well over 100,000 internet cafes exist in the country, and out of those, around 30,000 are i8 cafes, using a system developed by Goyoo. That means, there’s an i8 for every 10,000 people in China. Just as a comparison, Korea is famous for having many internet cafes, and there’s an internet cafe for every 2500 people.

According to the CEO, Jerry Wang, Goyoo’s system consists of launcher software on the PCs, games, and routers and servers to to support their distribution system. The company operates an advertising network, AdPro, which serves advertisements to the monitors of the PCs in these cafes. That’s the main source of revenue for the company. The maximum impressions achieved in a single day is 150 million, and that came just after four months after the launch of AdPro.

The difference between AdPro and the other existing ad networks is that it can pick up very detailed user attributes. It can identify which site each user views because of the identification card required by law in China for people to internet cafes. So advertisers can control the advertisements they serve to each user. It is also possible to track users’ movement across different websites.

Goyoo is also the world-biggest partner DSP (demand-side platform) for Baidu, covering about 25 million users.

The company plans to launch a new service, LeWifi, which will be distributed to other internet cafes (besides i8) and fast-food restaurants for free. The router of LeWifi can be controlled completely in the cloud, just like Cisco’s Meraki. The company plans to share revenue with outlets based on the amount of traffic to the router. They expect to reach $30 million in annual sales and 100 million daily users in 2014. LeWifi routers will be set up in as many as 200,000 outlets all over in China.

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Watch out WeChat! Japan’s Line becomes the top social app in China

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Japanese chat application Line pulled off a pretty impressive feat this week, achieving the top spot in Apple’s Chinese App Store in the social networking category on April 8. This is especially interesting because so far in Asia, each of the big chat app players Line (Japan), Kakaotalk (Korea), and Weixin/WeChat (China) have each dominated on their home turf. For Line to become the top social networking app in China, having only launched back on December 12, is a significant achievement. According to a China Daily report, it was helped along initially by being introduced via Qihoo 360’s Mobile Assistant. After becoming the top social app on Monday, it has since dropped to number two. But the app is still rising in the overall ‘free app’ rankings (currently ranked 7th), and I wouldn’t be surprised if it reaches number one overall in the next few days. Line is branded as ‘Lian wo ’ or ‘Link Me’ in China, with apps available on iOS, Android, and PC. Given the fact that some individuals in China can be hostile towards Japanese brands, it’s encouraging to see a made-in-Japan service getting some love in the country. Weixin is, of course, still China’s dominant…

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Japanese chat application Line pulled off a pretty impressive feat this week, achieving the top spot in Apple’s Chinese App Store in the social networking category on April 8.

This is especially interesting because so far in Asia, each of the big chat app players Line (Japan), Kakaotalk (Korea), and Weixin/WeChat (China) have each dominated on their home turf. For Line to become the top social networking app in China, having only launched back on December 12, is a significant achievement.

According to a China Daily report, it was helped along initially by being introduced via Qihoo 360’s Mobile Assistant. After becoming the top social app on Monday, it has since dropped to number two. But the app is still rising in the overall ‘free app’ rankings (currently ranked 7th), and I wouldn’t be surprised if it reaches number one overall in the next few days.

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Photo: China Daily

Line is branded as ‘Lian wo ’ or ‘Link Me’ in China, with apps available on iOS, Android, and PC. Given the fact that some individuals in China can be hostile towards Japanese brands, it’s encouraging to see a made-in-Japan service getting some love in the country. Weixin is, of course, still China’s dominant chat app in terms of overall downloads.

On a related note, Korea’s Kakaotalk has recently made a little progress in Japan, announcing last week that it has surpassed the 10 million downloads milestone, although it’s still a distant second to Line’s 45 million.

Weixin, while dominant in China, has a tougher challenge on its hands in achieving success among non-Chinese users.

For more information on the growth of Line, please check out our interactive Line Timeline which chronicles its growth from its launch back in 2011 up until the present day.