Executive summary. Ask a sales or marketing director how B2B outreach works in Thailand, and email or LinkedIn will usually come up first. Ask a Thai buyer how they prefer to communicate with suppliers, and the answer is far more likely to be LINE. The country's dominant messaging app, used by 54 million people, or more than 80% of the population according to its parent company, has spent the past few years evolving into a business platform. First, banks, government agencies and consumer brands turned LINE into a structured channel for managing relationships with millions of customers, rather than simply a place to chat. Now the same shift is moving into B2B sales conversations that still largely assume email is the default.
This brief traces that evolution from private messaging to consumer engagement to B2B sales, and examines where manufacturers and B2B SMEs selling in Thailand may already be falling behind.
01The reach nobody in B2B accounts for
Start with the plain numbers. LINE reported 54 million users in Thailand in early 2026, more than 80% of the population, according to LY Corporation, its parent company. Separate 2025 data from DataReportal puts weekly LINE usage at over 92% of the country's internet users, and finds that more than 70% of them already follow at least one brand or business account.
Those figures describe consumers. But the person approving a purchase order or managing a supplier relationship at a Thai company is the same person who checks LINE more often than email. A sales process that treats email as the default channel is, for a large and growing share of Thai buyers, already missing where the conversation happens.
02From personal chat to a structured channel: consumers first, B2B next
The more revealing shift isn't how many people use LINE. It's how organisations started using it to run a relationship at scale instead of just answering messages. LY Corporation's own account of "LINE for Business" in Thailand includes Siam Commercial Bank, which runs account inquiries, payments and call-centre support through its "SCB Connect" LINE Official Account, and Thailand's Social Security Office, which moved its notifications onto LINE and, by LY Corporation's account, cut more than 200,000 outbound support calls a year as a result. Both are consumer-facing: a bank and a government agency serving millions of individual account holders, not businesses selling to other businesses.
03LINE is building up for SMEs, not just large enterprises
This isn't only a large-enterprise story. LINE's 2023 "Open Platform for Thai" initiative was built explicitly around small and medium enterprises that, in the words of LINE Thailand's own CTO, Weera Kasetsin, "often do not have development teams" and need "ready-to-use, high-quality solutions" rather than custom systems. The tools that came out of it, MyShop and MyCustomer|CRM, exist specifically to give smaller Thai businesses the same structured, trackable relationship a larger company gets from a dedicated CRM, inside the one app their customers already have open.
Independent academic research points the same way: a study of Thai SMEs using LINE as a business tool, published in the International Journal of Economics, Business and Management Research, found consistent gains in sales and customer engagement among the companies that ran it as a managed channel, not as an ad hoc extension of personal messaging.
04What this means for a B2B seller
None of this argues for abandoning email or LinkedIn. For cross-border and larger-ticket deals, they still do real work. But for a manufacturer, distributor or B2B supplier selling primarily to other Thai companies, treating LINE as a footnote means missing where a growing share of the actual conversation already happens: the quotation follow-up, the delivery update, the relationship that keeps a client from drifting to whoever replies faster.
The catch is the same one the luxury brands above were solving for: a sales channel run from someone's personal phone isn't a channel a company can actually manage. There's no shared list of who the company is actually talking to, no visibility into which accounts have gone quiet, and no data telling a sales director which leads are worth chasing.
05Where NexHive fits
That's the specific gap NexHive is built to close. It brings your LINE, WhatsApp and email contacts into a single dashboard. Kai, NexHive's AI sales assistant, helps you review the pipeline and see which leads are hot and where deals are stalling; Maya, its marketing counterpart, helps you segment contacts and build campaigns across the same channels. Every contact is auto-tagged and scored, so a growing account list doesn't turn into a backlog. None of this asks a company to leave LINE. It gives the contacts made there a home in a system the company owns, not just a salesperson's phone.
