Line Thailand's strategy this year will focus on expanding the Line Man feature and adding new fintech services, but the company is scant with specifics on how its local moves differ from its global strategy.
"It's rare for a regional office to do something so ambitious; we give them a lot of freedom," said Brian Lee, vice-president of global communications at Line, referring to the Line Man app, which is not available in Line's home country of Japan. "We are also looking into fintech, and you will probably see something next year with our partner KBank."
More details will be announced soon, he said, adding that Line sees fintech as a "huge market" for the company.
Line's chief executive, Takeshi Idezawa, explained the company's hyper-localised strategy in a group interview with the press after Line's recent conference in Tokyo.
"We are not like Silicon Valley, who have one global standard and launch new services globally across their apps," Mr Idezawa said. "Instead we go by the concept of hyper-localisation or culturised, which goes beyond simple localisation and takes into account the culture and customs of each market."
Messaging and Line Pay are the two major global services for Line, while each regional office in Thailand, Taiwan or Indonesia has a hodgepodge of different products and services.
Line Man
Line Man, which offers food delivery, ride hailing and delivery, is unavailable in Japan; it was created to meet the needs of the Thai market. Line Pay was also launched in Taiwan before becoming available in Japan and eventually all Line markets.
"Complying with local laws in each market is a bigger challenge for standardising our app," Mr Idezawa said. "Depending on the location, laws around cross-border money transfers can be different, but Line Pay helps with that."
Jun Masuda, Line's chief strategy and marketing officer, said Line Man came out of a request by the local team in Thailand.
"We are proud of our Thailand team for building the service and making it extremely popular in the market," Mr Masuda said. "Line Man is an offline service that depends on the conditions of the market, like traffic, number of retail stores, congestion of those stores, so it has to have different applications in our global strategy."
Line also addressed issues over security and the spread of fake news on its platform. The company was one of the later messaging apps to add end-to-end encryption to its messages, having done so in 2015, but Line still touts its commitment to security.
It's notable, however, that during the ongoing protests in Hong Kong, protesters are using the messaging app Telegram over Line in the belief that it is more secure from the prying eyes of governments.
"Telegram markets itself as the safest, but we also use end-to-end encryption," said Mr Lee, the communications director. "At the end of the day, we never got hacked and they did."
Telegram was the target of a large denial-of-service attack, but it's not apparent any user data was stolen. WhatsApp, the world's largest messaging app, was hacked by an Israeli spy firm that was able to steal personal information simply by making a phone call.
With the added government powers of the Cybersecurity Act and the Computer Crimes Act to access personal information and punish people for speech, the security of private messaging has never been more important for Thais.
With regard to fake news, Mr Masuda said the company is working on artificial intelligence solutions to prevent the spread of fake news on Line. A recent Poynter Institute report showed that some malicious accounts were using the promise of free stickers to spread false health articles.
"We can have an initiative to validate which news is fake or not, but it is very difficult to detect," Mr Masuda said. "And if we take too strong a stance on cracking down on fake news, it could impact the freedom of expression of journalists."
He said any user caught spreading fake news would be banned, and the company hopes to create a system of both technology and human monitors for the issue, especially on the upcoming Open Chat feature.