TCA Financial: The company behind the highly popular “Line” chat application started trading in New York despite being little known outside of a handful of countries outside Asia. Some 218 million users in Thailand, Indonesia, Taiwan and Japan use the app religiously for calls, messaging, sending money and even streaming music. It sells millions of dollars’ worth of stickers to an enthusiastic user base with an insatiable appetite for all things “cute”
The company expects to raise more than $1.1 billion dollars from the floatation making it by some considerable margin, the biggest tech IPO in 2016. Despite the optimism surrounding the launch however, there is so concern about the app’s ability to expand beyond the markets where it is most popular. Most people in the US and Europe have never downloaded the app, preferring, instead, to rely on rivals like Whatsapp, Messenger or Twitter.
Colin Phipps, chief economist at TCA Financial said, “This is the fifth major tech IPO we’ve had this year but compared to the 15 we’d already had by this time last year, there are questions being raised over investor appetite for yet another chat app.”
Line has, like its US counterpart, Twitter, begun to notice a drop in user growth and has had to find new ways to make money from its existing user base and this may hamper the company’s stock going forward.
TCA Financial says it has advised clients not to partake in the IPO and, instead to wait for more information on how the company intends to extend the app’s appeal beyond the four countries where it enjoys its greatest popularity.

About TCA Financial:
TCA Financial is resolutely committed to helping our clients accumulate and preserve wealth by actively managing the deployment of their investment capital within the global financial markets. We have a proven, checkable track record of being able to accomplish this regardless of the prevailing macro-economic conditions because of our expertise and professionalism and because we know that markets, just like people, are all connected to varying degrees at varying times.