LINE Corp.’s onwards expansion march has taken an interesting turn this week with the company extending its services to unexpectedly take on Uber Inc., at least in Japan.

The new LINE Taxi service allows LINE users to book taxis directly from the LINE app, and was launched in the Tokyo metropolitan area (23 wards, Mitaka City and Musashino City) Wednesday.

LINE Taxi differs from the standard Uber experience in that it utilizes existing taxis through a tie-up with cab company Nihon Kotsu Co., but like Uber, users will be provided with approximate wait times, their location will be identified via GPS, and payments will be made through the firms payment service LINE Pay.

3,500 taxis will be available at launch for users to book, and eventually with a Japan wide rollout (coming in the “near future”) that number is expected to increase to 20,000.

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Uber killer

Although utilizing existing taxis exclusively for the new service, the killer feature for LINE is its existing user base; the company has a global user base of 560 million, of which as of late December 170 million were active. As of October 2014 the company had 54 million registered users in Japan according to Statista, a staggering 43 percent of the entire population of the country.

Uber’s traditional model of using non-licensed drivers to take people from point A to B doesn’t appear to have had much traction in the Japanese market, at least they’ve declined to comment, when they’d usually boast about their success.

By all accounts (unlike many other places) Tokyo is well served by its taxis, and Uber recognized this in August 2014 when it launched UberTAXI in Tokyo, a near identical service to that launched this week by LINE.

Even with a diversity of choice in the Japanese market, Uber has as much chance of defeating LINE for user numbers as Microsoft Corp. has in its efforts to challenge Google Inc. in search.

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Foreign expansion

Although LINE has made no statement at this time as to whether LINE Taxi will expand beyond Japan, the figures in the region and even some other countries are just as confronting to Uber as they are in Japan.

In Thailand, LINE has a user base of 33 million (again October 2014,) 49 percent of the population, while in Taiwan a beyond staggering 17 million people are registered as LINE users out of a population of 23.34 million (73 percent.)

It’s not just Asia where LINE is popular. It may only has 10 million users in the United States, but in Spain LINE has 18 million registered users from a population of 47 million (38 percent of all people), and it also puts in a reasonable showing in countries including Mexico and Columbia.

LINE doesn’t need to challenge Uber in its core markets in the Anglosphere, it could quite simply stymie Uber’s growth opportunities across the rest of the world, particularly in Asia and Spanish speaking countries.

Uber is fighting laws on nearly every front,while LINE has a user base and, importantly, a 100 percent legal service that has the potential to be a market winner, where and when it chooses to compete in countries it already has a commanding presence in.