Facebook buys WhatsApp for $ 16 billion

Facebook Corporation notified the Securities Commission about the purchase of a WhatsApp mobile messaging service for $ 16 billion.



The transaction provides for the payment of $ 4 billion in cash, $ 12 billion in shares and an additional $ 3 billion in options for four years to retain a few WhatsApp employees, including 32 programmers and 0 PR and marketing specialists . A dedicated package is about 7.9% of all Facebook shares and 35% of the available money.



In the official blog, Facebook explained the reason for the purchase. The company hopes to accelerate the growth and “user engagement” of both Facebook and WhatsApp. The deal will cost a record amount in the entire history of mobile applications. Moreover, this is an absolute record in the history of venture startups. The previous record was the cable operator Continental Cablevision (1996, $ 11.8 billion), Skype was second (2011, $ 8.5 billion).

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The world's largest IM messaging service will continue to operate independently under its brand, and the release of its own Facebook Messenger application will also continue. The success of this strategy while preserving the company's independence after the purchase was shown by the example of Instagram. In addition, Facebook guaranteed that the service will not be any advertising, as before.



WhatsApp's monthly active audience exceeds 450 million people, i.e. 14 million active users per developer. Surely soon the audience will grow to a billion. Of these, 72% are active every day (for comparison, the standard for the industry is the ratio of a daily to a monthly audience of 0.1-0.2 ).







The number of messages transmitted by WhatsApp is comparable to the global volume of SMS traffic: up to 54 billion per day (if you take the received and sent messages into account) between the seven supported platforms. With such a load, the Erlang backend in programming language demonstrates 99.92456% uptime (in 2013).



WhatsApp continues active growth: more than 1 million users install the application daily. However, with the current size of the audience, Facebook pays $ 35.6 for each user: to put it mildly, a considerable amount for the program, an annual subscription for which costs $ 1. Last year, the company earned only $ 20 million. On the other hand, about the same for one user at one time paid Google when buying YouTube.



PS By the way, the co-founder of WhatsApp, Jan Kum (Jan Koum) and his mother emigrated to the United States from Ukraine at the age of 16, carrying 20 textbooks in suitcases. At first, he ate by grocery brands, which in the USA since the 60s have been produced to support the poor and hungry. Now 31-year-old Kum owns about 45% of WhatsApp ($ 6.8 billion).



PPS The second co-founder of WhatsApp, Brian Acton, in 2009, after being fired from Yahoo, did not take on Twitter and Facebook, so he joined his friend’s venture. Now he owns about 20% of the shares ($ 3.2 billion).