Facebook has finally sealed the WhatsApp deal for a mighty 21.8 billion dollars. On 19th February, 2014, Facebook had announced its acquisition of instant messaging app — WhatsApp for 19 billion dollars. This amount shot up thanks to the rise in Facebook’s stock price. Even companies like Apple and Google have not invested so much in acquiring a company. Recently, Apple purchased Beats for a mere 3 billion dollars.
WhatsApp’s founder Jan Koum will now be on the board of directors at Facebook and like will earn 1 dollar salary per annum. Although, he has been given large amount of Facebook shares. Facebook has now made it mandatory to install the messenger to use the chat feature on mobile. So, it remains to be seen if WhatsApp gets integrated into Facebook Messenger or continues to work as a separate application. WhatsApp claims to have around 1 billion users and is very popular in countries like India and Brazil.
After this deal, many companies are investing to make a instant messaging app. WeChat is China’s WhatsApp and it tried to achieve the same success in India. Hike, an app made in India gives people free talktime if they manage to get their friends to the app. News is that even Google is planning to build an instant messaging app for developing countries. After its launch of the Android One devices in India, it clearly indicates that Google has plans for these countries. We have to see how WhatsApp sustains its user base with all this competition.
