Billion-euro deal: Facebook buys Whatsapp
The world's largest online network Facebook is swallowing up the popular short message service Whatsapp for 16 billion dollars. The high purchase price will be paid in cash and Facebook shares. Whatsapp is to remain a separate service.
The purchase is to be paid for with four billion dollars in cash and Facebook shares worth twelve billion dollars, as Facebook announced on Wednesday. A further 3 billion dollars will later be paid to the founders and employees in the form of blocked shares. Smartphone users can exchange text messages or photos with each other via Whatsapp. Whatsapp has thus firmly established itself as an SMS alternative. The service has more than 450 million users per month, 70 percent of whom use it daily. "WhatsApp is on its way to connecting a billion people," explained Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg. That is why the service is so valuable. Facebook itself has more than 1.2 billion users.
Financed by subscription, among other things
This also marks the end of an experiment for a communication service that was not based on user data and was not financed by advertising. Co-founder Jan Koum, who is now joining the Facebook Board of Directors, had always emphasized that this was not the intention. Whatsapp was initially financed by the purchase price for the app and most recently by an annual subscription fee of one dollar. In view of its size, Koum claimed a few weeks ago at the DLD internet conference in Munich that there was still enough money to run the company. Around 18 billion messages are sent worldwide every day. WhatsApp turned this avalanche around with a small budget and just 50 employees. Measured against this, the 16 billion dollars is a very proud price.
Largest acquisition
Facebook already has its own messaging service with similar functions. However, Mark Zuckerberg also bought the photo platform Instagram for almost one billion dollars, even though Facebook users were already able to share images. The Whatsapp takeover is the largest for Facebook to date. According to reports, Facebook also recently wanted to buy the currently popular photo app Snapchat, where images disappear by themselves, but the founders turned it down. The Whatsapp deal comes just a few days after the Japanese online retailer Rakuten bought the communication app Viber for 900 million dollars. Viber has 300 million users. (SDA)
