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obile app LINE hopes to see more Indonesian creative content producers breaking into foreign markets this year, partially through its upcoming 2016 LINE Creativate competition, which will showcase mainly stickers and Webtoons from local creators.

Through the Creativate competition, which is the largest creative competition event in Indonesia, the company says that its mission is to showcase the amount and quality of Indonesian-made LINE Webtoon series, stickers and mobile games so that they can hopefully gain traction in LINE’s foreign markets, allowing Indonesian content to go global.

Two victors in the 2015 event, the Webtoon series Eggnoid and My Pre Wedding, have managed to break the Top 10 in Thailand. The two comics proved to be hugely popular with Indonesian readers, staying within the Webtoons Top 10 for a long time before they managed to gain the attention of Thai readers.

“I think one of the reasons why these toons were received so well in Thailand was because of the rather similar habits and culture between Indonesian and Thai readers,” LINE Indonesia managing director Ongki Kurniawan commented recently.

The idea of going global has been enthusiastically encouraged by the government, with Creative Economy Agency head Triawan Munaf previously commenting that Indonesian creative players need to keep making universally relevant content in order for Indonesian content to truly succeed in a global setting.

“The localization of creativity [is] all very well. However, we also want our creations to be understood and used on a global scale, like how some of LINE’s content resonates with those around the world,” Triawan said.

President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo is also keen on developing the nation’s high-potential digital economy, with a target to have 1,000 technopreneurs by 2020.

Meanwhile, LINE is planning to push more webcomics in the Thai market and will assess their performance in that market before ultimately pushing them in the larger LINE markets of Taiwan, South Korea and Japan.

Indonesia’s LINE Webtoons service is the company’s largest segment and market, with around 6 million weekly readers and 36 of the total 88 titles coming from Indonesia since the service was launched in April 2015.

The event in 2015 also brought in 1,000 participants consisting of Webtoon creators and also LINE sticker designers. LINE’s sticker industry is significant in Indonesia with a relatively successful sticker series able to sell 20 million stickers per day.

This year’s event, which will take place at Gandaria City Mall on 18 to 20 November, will also include LINE game developers for the first time as Indonesia has not spawned any LINE game developers or local content as of yet.

The LINE Creators Market in Indonesia is currently home to 48,577 creators. LINE is reportedly present in about 70 percent of all smartphones active in Indonesia.

LINE recorded a total of 220 million monthly global active users in the second quarter of 2016, with Indonesia listed as its largest market with an estimated 90 million users.

Meanwhile the Japan-based app plans to launch the digital payment service LINE Pay in Indonesia later this year after LINE finalized a deal with one of Indonesia’s largest banks.