SoftBank's Yahoo Japan to merge with Line app operator

TOKYO - Japan's Z Holdings, formerly Yahoo Japan, will merge with mobile chat app operator Line, the firms said Monday, in a bid to boost the customer base for their digital services.

Mobile operator SoftBank Corp, the parent of Z Holdings (ZHD), and South Korea's Naver, Line's parent company, agreed the merger of ZHD and Line, SoftBank and Naver said in a joint statement.

Line will be delisted after SoftBank and Naver make a tender offer, with the merger expected to happen in October 2020.

The decision "aims to bring together the business resources of the ZHD Group and the LINE Group, which have overwhelming user bases and abundant assets in Japan, to provide a convenient experience to users in Japan," the statement said.

SoftBank also plans to invest in expanding into new business areas and "aims to be a leading company that is a driving force across Japan, Asia and worldwide."

The merger "will be conducted on an equal basis by ZHD and LINE with the aim of forming a business group that can overcome fierce domestic and global competition" and the newly integrated company will implement "business investment targeting growth in the areas of AI, commerce, Fintech, advertising" among others, it said.

The final price for the tender offer is still under discussion.

SoftBank Corp. a mobile unit of telecom and investment giant SoftBank Group, holds a 44-percent stake in Z Holdings, while Line is controlled by Naver.

Line was launched in 2011 after Japan's quake-tsunami disaster damaged telecoms infrastructure.

It combines features from Facebook, Skype and WhatsApp with games and a mobile payment service.

SoftBank and Line have increasingly competed in fields such as digital payments, while both firms have also been investing in artificial intelligence to improve their services.

Shares in SoftBank Corp were trading down 0.46 percent at 1,501 yen and its parent SoftBank Group was up 0.82 percent at 4,295 yen in early trade.

Shares in ZHD were up 1.43 percent at 423 yen and Line trading up 2.57 percent at 5,179 yen.

source: news.abs-cbn.com

Twitter expands ads to outside websites, apps

SAN FRANCISCO - Twitter unveiled plans Tuesday to sell ads that run outside its own platform in what could be the start of a broader advertising network.

The one-to-many messaging service announced it would begin syndicating its "promoted tweets" to allow advertisers to reach people who are not on Twitter itself.

The first partners for the service will be Yahoo Japan and the news app Flipboard.

Because tweets are already embedded in those services, the new arrangement will allow advertisers to deliver promoted messages directly to users of those services.

"These new partnerships open a significant opportunity to extend the reach of their message to a larger audience," Twitter's Ameet Ranadive said in a blog post.

"Syndicated ads will be seen by users within Twitter content sections on third-party properties, as well as within third-party content areas."

The move allows an advertiser to run a simultaneous campaign on and off Twitter, Ranadive noted.

"Thousands of Web and mobile applications already syndicate Tweets to provide compelling content experiences, through products such as Fabric and Twitter for Websites," he added.

"Combine that with the flexibility and control of a promoted tweet, and we think marketers will have an almost infinite capacity to create large-scale, rich and well-targeted advertising campaigns across a variety of platforms. In a small number of private tests with Flipboard, both Flipboard and our advertising partners saw promising results."

Twitter, which unveils quarterly results this week, has been under pressure to show both revenue and user growth following its highly anticipated 2013 initial public offering.

Twitter is seeking to boost engagement with users amid growth which has been slower than some analysts have expected.

In October, Twitter said the number of monthly users grew 23 percent from a year earlier to 284 million.

A Pew Research Center report showed that among US users, Twitter is behind Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn and Instagram in the number of users.

source: www.abs-cbnnews.com