Nihon Keizai Shimbun reported on the 15th that Line Yahoo, the operator of the Line messenger, completed its system separation from Naver in April. With this, the entrustment relationship for service development and operations in Japan between Naver and Line Yahoo also ended.
Nikkei said Line Yahoo plans to prepare measures to prevent a recurrence of the personal information leak by June. Line Yahoo will then complete its accounting audit work and delete data retained for backup. Until today, Line Yahoo has been reporting the progress of the separation to the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications and the Personal Information Protection Commission.
The largest shareholder of Line Yahoo is A Holdings, a joint venture established by Naver and SoftBank. Currently, SoftBank and Naver each hold 50% equity in A Holdings.
In November 2023, the Japanese government took issue with Line Yahoo's excessive reliance on Naver in relation to an incident in which about 510,000 items of personal information were leaked from Line Yahoo, which shared some internal systems, after Naver Cloud was hit by a cyberattack. The Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications conducted administrative guidance twice, on Mar. 5, 2024 and on the 16th of April, and demanded improvements to the management structure, including a "review of capital ties with Naver." In connection with this, controversy arose over whether SoftBank and Line Yahoo, using the Japanese government's administrative guidance as a pretext, strongly pressed Naver to sell its equity in a bid to seize management control.