Facebook acquires Whatsap for $ 19 billion

Posted by: b3rrilyn in News Feb 20, 2014

The mega $19 billion deal between Facebook and Whatsapp has left the people talking about its worthiness. Though, Facebook founder CEO Mark Zuckerberg has explained as to why his company has agreed to pay a whopping $19bn to acquire the messaging service WhatsApp.

It may seem a pure business deal but the kind of money Facebook has agreed to pay the surging WhatsApp reveals the largest social networking site’s ultimate aim: to remain on top of its competitors. So, it bought the most popular messaging service, the WhatsApp.

With acquisition of the service which already has around 450 million users, mostly youth, Facebook, which adds around 1.2 billion users monthly, will continue to stay at the heart of social networking.

Additionally, Whatsapp has a huge mobile user base and this deal is going to enable Facebook to dominate the mobile social platform.

Very much like what they did to Instagram, Whatsapp will remain a separate entity, as explained by Mark Zuckerberg in the statement he released after Facebook’s decision to buy the messaging service.

Read Mark’s statement below:

�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 450m people on every major mobile platform. More than 1m people sign up for WhatsApp every day and it is on its way to connecting 1bn 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 forInternet.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 [Koum, WhatsApp founder and chief executive] 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.