Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 831 posts

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

#271

Post by pawelk »

yeukhon wrote: post #44

16B? That's a B, people. While there are a lot of whatsapp users (and people have to pay to use it), wow, that's still a lot of money! How can they justify revenue that way? How can any company ever consider such acquisition? I don't even think Google can even make 16B like this. See this discussion: http://www.quora.com/WhatsApp-Messenger/How-much-revenue-is-... $20M net revenue, at most, right? With future expansio…

> 16B? That's a B, people.

I wanted to put the number into perspective to wrap my head around it and it seems that $19B (I've added the $3B RSUs) was the public healthcare budget for 2013 in my country of almost 40 milion citizens.

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

#272

Post by wllchng »

This is definitely a defensive move against Tencent, who is using Wechat as their weapon for global penetration. Tencent must be seen as a threat, given their ability to monetize their userbase drastically better than Facebook or Twitter. There are rumors that Tencent is also a covert investor in Snapchat as well.

GGV Partner and China VC Hans Tung makes the argument that Tencent's market cap will overtake Facebook's in 3-5 years. http://www.bloomberg.com/video/could-chinese-competition-bea...

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

#273

Post by andrewfelix »

josh2600 wrote: post #104

For everyone saying this is a waste of money, consider the commentary around Instagram at $1B. Basically the world said that this was a horrible acquisition at the time, but in retrospect, buying Instagram was quite cheap. Buying your closest competitor for less than 15% of your market cap is usually a good idea. Fast forward to today. What'sapp is the dominant messaging application across the world. Carriers hate it…

It could also be intentionally high to price others out of the market. If this is the new going rate for users, there's not many companies out there that can make acquisitions like this.

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

#274

Post by the_watcher »

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…

You also got to add in the 1 million users they have been adding a month. It doesn't substantially change the numbers unless that growth continues for a long time, but Facebook didn't pay for their numbers today, but the numbers they expect them to have in the future.

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

#277

Post by [deleted] »

ozgune wrote: post #194
pitchups wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty amazing that this is precisely what Microsoft paid for Hotmail in 1998 : $400 million for 10 million users = $40 / User. [1] The parallels are striking : Whatsapp is to messaging today what Hotmail was to messaging in the late '90s. [1] http://news.cnet.com/2100-1033-206717.html

Except that people weren't paying to get a Hotmail account. WhatsApp users pay $1/year, so their revenues are around that of Twitter's.

[deleted]

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

#280

Post by rokhayakebe »

downandout wrote: post #107
psbp wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or facebook is trying to trivialize and destroy the startup market.

I'm not sure I'd call the WhatsApp of today a startup.

Why not? ~50 employees, a couple of years old, $8M in funding.
Post reply on HN