Facebook announced on Wednesday afternoon that it reached an agreement to buy popular mobile messaging start-up WhatsApp for an upfront total of $16 billion, including $4 billion in cash and about $12 billion in Facebook shares. Not sure how much rivalry Facebook has with WhatsApp the mobile messaging service. But, it is sure that all the smartphones, especially androids, are now installed with WhatsApp and it is considered as one of the best instant messaging service available today. Web giant Facebook focused to WhatsApp and Mark Zuckerberg certainly have some specific intentions on paying $19 billion to acquire WhatsApp, considerably a small company when comparing with Facebook. There are lots of rumors and a search in the shadow of those rumors revealed following.
WhatsApp already claimed they have 430 Million active users worldwide and that can be considered as a huge number and it is still increasing. It is adding 1 million new users per day. WhatsApp is much stronger than Facebook Messenger in Europe, Latin America, Africa and Australia and has attracted users at a time when it appears that young people are turning away from Facebook. According to the CEO of WhatsApp, Jan Koum, about 50 billion messages are exchanging daily through WhatsApp service. Another best fact about this app is, it is totally ad free!
Zuckerberg thinking that the 1 billion mark for WhatsApp will be crossed very near future as it is one of the best cross-platform mobile app that allow users to send messages without having to pay telecom charges, WhatsApp is free to use for 12 months and then costs a mere 99 cents a year. He feel it is incredible valuable if a service that have 1 billion or more users. Facebook reportedly sought to acquire another hot messaging firm, Snapchat, for $3 billion last year. In 2012 Facebook closed its deal for Instagram, worth some $1 billion at the time based on stock value. WhatsApp CEO say: “WhatsApp started almost five years ago with a simple mission of building a cool product used globally by everybody. It is extremely high user engagement and rapid growth are driven by the simple, powerful and instantaneous messaging capabilities we provide. He believe this tie-up gives WhatsApp the flexibility to grow and expand” WhatsApp has just 32 software engineers, which means that each one supports some 14m users. And the volume of messages it is handling is said to be the equivalent of all the SMS messages transmitted by the world’s telecoms companies. Facebook promised to keep the WhatsApp brand and service, and pledged a $1 billion cash break-up fee if the deal falls through.
Mark’s Facebook pages says:
I’m excited to announce that we’ve agreed to acquire WhatsApp and that their entire team will be joining us at Facebook.
Our mission is to make the world more open and connected. We do this by building services that help people share any type of content with any group of people they want. WhatsApp will help us do this by continuing to develop a service that people around the world love to use every day.
WhatsApp is a simple, fast and reliable mobile messaging service that is used by over 450 million people on every major mobile platform. More than 1 million people sign up for WhatsApp every day and it is on its way to connecting one billion people. More and more people rely on WhatsApp to communicate with all of their contacts every day.
WhatsApp will continue to operate independently within Facebook. The product roadmap will remain unchanged and the team is going to stay in Mountain View. Over the next few years, we’re going to work hard to help WhatsApp grow and connect the whole world. We also expect that WhatsApp will add to our efforts for Internet.org, our partnership to make basic internet services affordable for everyone.
WhatsApp will complement our existing chat and messaging services to provide new tools for our community. Facebook Messenger is widely used for chatting with your Facebook friends, and WhatsApp for communicating with all of your contacts and small groups of people. Since WhatsApp and Messenger serve such different and important uses, we will continue investing in both and making them each great products for everyone.
WhatsApp had every option in the world, so I’m thrilled that they chose to work with us. I’m looking forward to what Facebook and WhatsApp can do together, and to developing great new mobile services that give people even more options for connecting.
I’ve also known Jan for a long time, and I know that we both share the vision of making the world more open and connected. I’m particularly happy that Jan has agreed to join the Facebook board and partner with me to shape Facebook’s future as well as WhatsApp’s
Jan and the WhatsApp team have done some amazing work to connect almost half a billion people. I can’t wait for them to join Facebook and help us connect the rest of the world.
WhatsApp investor Sequoia has also posted some information about the acquisition, specifically its very large valuation. The company notes that it only has 32 engineers — making the ratio 1 engineer to every 14 million users. It processes 50 billion messages a day across seven platforms.
Here is the interesting story of WhatsApp
This Business news compiled and posted by Sherin Dev+ of Investinternals.com