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NAVER Cloud’s LINE WORKS Marks its Fifth Year as No. 1 Business Messaging Platform in Japan

 - LINE WORKS solidifying its No. 1 position with 33.6% of market share, and a 43.1% share of registered users in Japan

- The outrageous growth of global clients from 100,000 in 2020 to 250,000 in the third quarter of 2021

 

2021-10-12 

 

NAVER Cloud today announced that LINE WORKS (also known as NAVER WORKS in the global market) continues to be the No. 1 business messaging platform in Japan for five consecutive years while strengthening its market position by gaining an advantage against the competitors worldwide.

 

According to a recent survey conducted by Fuji Chimera Research Institute, Inc., LINE WORKS remains the most dominant platform in sales and number of users for five consecutive years. The market share reached 33.6% with an increase of 3% from the previous year, widening the sales gap to 4% against the second-largest messaging platform. LINE WORKS recorded the highest number of users at 43.1% with an increase of 4% from the previous year, providing its rapid and strong growth while many other businesses have turned into negative growth.

 

Thanks to its ease of use and compatibility with LINE messenger, LINE WORKS has maintained its position at the top of the Japanese business messaging platform market. Last year, while its existing clients further expanded the use of LINE WORKS platform in their organizations, there was a significant growth in the number of new users with increased demand in virtual working arrangements to adapt to the COVID-19 environment. To facilitate companies to adapt to this new environment, NAVER Cloud enhanced LINE WORKS’ features such as video call and survey functions and improved compatibility with industry-specific tools. As a result, more than 110 tools were compatible with LINE WORKS by June 2021.

 

Fuji Chimera Research Institute expects the number of LINE WORKS’ paid subscribers to rise by approximately 50% by the end of 2021. It is analyzed that NAVER Cloud will secure more clients in new sectors such as construction, medical, and welfare along with increased use of accounts by existing clients. In line with this prospect, NAVER Cloud is striving to improve its functions through service planning and development, and compatibility with external services. For example, LINE WORKS can be integrated with solutions specialized in the construction industry, such as Photoruction, a cloud service to support smart construction and civil engineering service.

 

LINE WORKS ranked No. 1 as the most popular groupware/business messaging app in its sector according to the Customer Satisfaction Survey 2021-2022 released last month by Nikkei Computer, Japan’s premier IT magazine. This survey covers 25 categories and is often used as a key reference for IT investments by various companies in Japan, as most of the survey respondents are in charge of information systems of companies or local governments. LINE WORKS also ranked first in performance/function, operation, cost, and more categories with higher scores than the overall market average.

 

In Japan, LINE WORKS gained a lot of popularity especially in the financial industry where salespeople often need to communicate with customers using LINE and be able to quickly share information between on-site and off-site employees. Tokio Marine & Nichido Fire Insurance – the largest and No. 1 non-life insurance company in Japan – chose LINE WORKS to help employees communicate effectively with the increased load of off-site work. While working off-site, employees can share their status and progress of their work over a quick message and a read receipt, which significantly reduces unnecessary time spent having to leave messages by email or phone. The company will also leverage LINE WORKS to set up a Business Continuity Plan (BCP) that can maintain its operational capability in the case of an unforeseen event or a disaster and communication with clients.

 

Chiba University Hospital in the Chiba prefecture adopted LINE WORKS to maintain its business continuity and to quickly respond to an emergency situation by sharing urgent medical updates with the person in charge at the scene. After the outbreak of the COVID-19, the hospital leveraged LINE WORKS' bot function to monitor the post-vaccine symptoms of their 2,500 employees. With employees sharing their latest status through bot function twice per day, the hospital was able to quickly react to anyone with severe vaccine side-effects. In addition, the bot function enabled the hospital to create a group chat and share live vaccine inventory data, which dramatically improved information sharing, minimized face-to-face meetings and travel time.

 

The growth of LINE WORKS has been remarkable, surpassing over 250,000 global customers including Japan. The number of customers exponentially increased to 100,000 last year, and 200,000 in the first quarter of this year, and reached 250,000 by September 2021.

  

LINE WORKS is contributing to the growth of the groupware market with its strong presence in overseas markets and is making substantial further progress as a market leader in Korea. NAVER Cloud initially released a free version of LINE WORKS in Korea in 2013, and started the paid-service in 2016 with the development of the domestic business messenger platform market. In October 2016, LINE WORKS was rebranded to a more familiar name in Korea, NAVER WORKS, to actively target B2B market while maintaining the LINE WORKS brand in Japan in order to target a multi-brand strategy.

 

The platform’s recent v3.2 update has improved the performance of 60 features and increased remote work support capabilities. NAVER Cloud aims to continue to dominate the market with a plan to improve its differentiated services through the launching of NAVER Cloud for SMART WORK, which is an integration of LINE WORKS, WORKPLACE (cloud business information and management system), and WORKBOX (clod file sharing service).

 

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