Just an hour ago, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced that his company has bought messaging app WhatsApp for a whopping $16 billion. And if that is not enough, Zuckerberg also dropped $3 billion to WhatsApp’s founders and employees. This marks the largest acquisition the social networking giant has pulled off as of late.
Available in multiple mobile platforms, WhatsApp has over 450 million monthly users and is currently registering over a million users daily. It is popular among people trying to evade text messaging charges.
“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,” Zuckerberg said in a statement posted as his status update on Facebook. “WhatsApp will help us do this by continuing to develop a service that people around the world love to use every day.”
WhatsApp will continue to work independently, with founder Jan Koum still heading the company. He will also become part of Facebook’s board of directors.
“We’re excited and honored to partner with Mark and Facebook as we continue to bring our product to more people around the world,” Koum said in a statement.
Reaction on the news has been mixed. Shares in Facebook dropped 5% hours after the purchase was announced, while Zuck’s status update received over 150,000 likes and is shared 41,000 times as of this posting, which is just on track with the millions of likes he receive on every status update he posts.
The acquisition comes after Japanese retail firm Rakuten announces its purchase of WhatsApp’s rival Viber for $900 million. The amount WhatsApp was purchased is also miles ahead of the $1 billion Facebook paid to acquire Instagram in 2012.
Source: BBC
