Naver's subsidiary Line (LINE) and Yahoo Japan, the grandson of Softbank, will hold a press conference early this week to announce their management integration, the Yomiuri Shimbun reported on Nov. 16.
Although it was originally expected that negotiations on the merger of management will be completed this month, it seems that the negotiations are in their final stages as they are rapidly gaining momentum.
Yomiuri said that Naver and Softbank have decided to maintain their respective brands of smart phone payment services, while maintaining their strengths.
Line has been targeting the mobile phone convenient settlement service market with Line Pay and Yahoo with Pay Pay. Currently, 37 million of Line's 85 million members are on Line Pay, while 19 million of Yahoo's 50 million users use Pay Pay.
Both companies have viewed the so-called "Pay Market" as a future growth area and used point-return system to expand their subscribers. However, it was a market expansion policy that was close to competition for hemorrhaging, and it was a policy that put money into the market rather than making money. For Line, it posted a deficit of 33.9 billion yen in the first nine months of the year.
If the merger is finalized, it is expected that they will expand the strategic market by incorporating technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) possessed by Softbank instead of an excessive market expansion policy.
Masayoshi Son, chairman of Softbank, is reportedly working on the management integration with the idea of creating a "Japanese version of Alibaba," which combines various financial services and Internet shopping.