After acquiring Instagram for a whopping 1 billion dollars back in 2012 and making a repetitive offers of up to 3 billion dollars to Snapchat, Facebook decided to add WhatsApp to its arsenal for a jaw-dropping 16 billion dollars. That’s a lot of zeros!
Also Read: The 3 Things Facebook Should Do in the Next Decade
According to The Next Web, the deal includes $4 billion in cash, $12 billion in Facebook shares and an additional $3 billion in vesting restricted stock units for the WhatsApp team over the next four years. We guess Facebook advertising provides a lot of cash, huh?
The decision was a no brainer for the king of social networks. WhatsApp has currently 450 million active users per month and its daily new registrations rate is 1 million per day. This means that Facebook will now acquire a huge user database which can cross-check with theirs and possibly provide new channels for instant messaging, or even improve their Facebook messenger app.
WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum wrote in his blog post:
[quote]WhatsApp will remain autonomous and operate independently. You can continue to enjoy the service for a nominal fee. You can continue to use WhatsApp no matter where in the world you are, or what smartphone you’re using. And you can still count on absolutely no ads interrupting your communication.[/quote]
This quote further reinforces our belief that Facebook is planning to provide total communication solutions and expand and improve its messaging platform.
This is not the first acquisition in the instant messaging field; In 2011, Facebook acquired mobile messaging service Beluga and Japanese ecommerce giant Rakuten bought Viber last week for $900 million.
Let’s see what the future brings for Facebook.
What do you think of this acquisition? Share your thoughts below:
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