LINE executive stresses cultural localization for global success

By Yoon Sung-won

BANGKOK, Thailand ― “A software service provider seeking to enter a foreign market needs to localize its services to blend into the native culture,” said LINE Chief Globalization Officer (CGO) Shin Jung-ho. He further explained that service providers should try to see a market from the perspective of the native culture and seek out what is best for the customers in their target markets.

“At LINE we use the term acculturation instead of localization because we believe that it can be arrogant to define the local and central cultures,” Shin said during a press meeting in Bangkok, Tuesday. “The concept is based on the view that all cultures should be equally respected. We should see the Thai market from the perspective of Thai culture when we provide our services in Thailand.”

Shin said Lee Hae-jin, the chairman of LINE and its parent company Naver, has long emphasized the importance of remaining unbiased in doing business in an overseas market.

“When I was leaving for Japan to begin the LINE business there in 2008, Lee wanted me to start from scratch and heed what people said in the Japanese market,” he said.

The CGO said service providers should focus on what they can do best and try to make it attractive to consumers.

“The basic protocols of Internet services have been made by U.S. businesses, but under their order and values, neither Naver nor LINE would survive the competition in terms of the economies of scale,” he said. “So we have thought hard about localization and reached the present point in LINE’s global business. I think we will have a chance once we complete LINE’s business shift from that of a mobile messenger service to an integrated smart portal.”

Shin said a smart portal refers to an intelligent integrated platform service that recommends what users may want at the moment, freeing them from actively making search inquiries.

In line with such ideas on cultural localization and the smart portal, the CGO said the company is pushing to establish separate systems in each target market in Korea, Japan, Taiwan and Thailand for planning, development and design.

“We have already set the systems in Korea, Japan and Taiwan and are working to do so in Thailand,” he said. “We are hiring more developers even if this will take more time.”

The CGO said the LINE Man service, a mobile delivery agent service, and mobile game Cookie Run, developed by Korean game studio Devsisters, are successful examples that benefited from independent operation by a Thai subsidiary and its efforts for cultural localization.

Shin underlined the significance of the Thai market, which has recently replaced Taiwan to become Korea’s second-largest strategic overseas market after Japan.

“We decide on the priority of each market in terms of the number of daily active users,” he said. “Thailand has recorded rapid growth in the smartphone penetration rate recently which has made us look more into this market.”