Facebook Buying WhatsApp for $16B in Cash and Stock Plus $3B in RSUs

Post by MichaelGG » Wed, Feb 19, 2014, 11:53 PM UTC

jpablo wrote: post #49

gamegoblin wrote: post #11

That is a LOT of money. That being said, I use WhatsApp every day to chat with my friends around the world and it's really excellent. I know it's used a lot in other parts of the world even more, so I doubt this purchase is focused on US markets. It seems that every one of my Arab friends uses WhatsApp to talk to their families back home (and they use it at home, too). I don't know about other regions.

WhassApp is the standard in Mexico. It replaced Windows Live (MSN) Messenger after they killed it by trying to make everybody switching to Skype and the interest of the people shifted to mobile.

Post by ulfw » Wed, Feb 19, 2014, 11:54 PM UTC

k-mcgrady wrote: post #320

matznerd wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1 million new users a day and most likely in countries where Facebook is not growing as quickly...

Is that really worth $16 BILLION though? Think of the marketing they could have done to get those users in those countries with 10% of that money.

Post by nly » Wed, Feb 19, 2014, 11:55 PM UTC

dhoulb wrote: post #196

I just can't get my head around that valuation. For something that's basically a feature, when they already have that functionality baked in, built out to a similar scale? It's not an acquisition for talent, or technology, so what is it? It's an acquisition for investors probably. To argue back against the people who say the kids are leaving FB. Well guess what, we BOUGHT the thing the kids are using. And it's 'mobil…

Post by colinbartlett » Wed, Feb 19, 2014, 11:55 PM UTC

bradleyjg wrote: post #286

hackinthebochs wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I conjecture that this price is a reflection of the fact that facebook realizes their stock is way overvalued, and so they used this opportunity to make a huge purchase which would be too expensive otherwise. The fact that a huge amount of the purchase price in stock is a strong signal for this. These same sorts of deals happened in the first internet bubble (although this is clearly different as there is also a huge…

The biggest shareholder hero of dotcom 1.0 was Steve Case buying a real company (Time Warner) with bubble shares. But is whatsapp Time Warner? $1/user/year even with a huge user base is still not that much revenue.

Post by tomasien » Wed, Feb 19, 2014, 11:56 PM UTC

nwh wrote: post #60

400,000,000 active users [0] 16,000,000,000 USD ---- $40 per user That's an incredible cost. We can assume Facebook is paying for the userbase, the app itself and it's infrastructure would basically run itself. It's less appealing when you realise that there's probably a miniscule fraction of WhatsApp users that don't have a Facebook account. > WhatsApp will remain autonomous and operate independently. You can contin…