Recently, there was a confirmation that came directly from Facebook saying that they have finally completed their acquisition of one of the most (if not THE most) popular messaging applications for mobile phones and tablets. The initial announcement was made by Facebook in February 2014. It said that they intend to acquire WhatsApp in the nearest future. After all this time, it seems they finally managed to get an approval from the European Commission and the United States Securities and they are ready to finish the deal. The deal itself was supervised by EU antitrust regulators and was approved this Friday, much to Facebook employee’s delight. Some people say that it took so long because the European Commission wanted to be absolutely sure that this deal will not damage the competition in any way. Some also speculate that the Commission was convinced after seeing the rate at which this market is growing. This is the largest deal Facebook has made in its history, hoping it will expand their existing services. This is very true, especially now that they have entered the mobile market (mobile messaging in particular).
Various reports suggest that the original price (back in February 2014) was around $19 billion. However, due to the recent rise of share prices, it is looking more like $22 billion for WhatsApp now. The company’s founder and CEO Jan Koum have recently joined the Facebook himself. Much like Mark Zuckerberg, he is said to receive only $1 a year in salary, but he will receive Facebook shares instead.
It shouldn’t surprise anybody that WhatsApp users are worried about the potential changes that this deal might bring. However, there have been no reports of any significant changes being planned in the nearest future. Some time earlier this year, Jan Koum assured users that WhatsApp intends to keep all of its essential features that made it popular to begin with. So, there is no reason to worry about that (at least for now).
Also, it is not looking like this service plans to drop their $0.99 per year subscription plan. And why would they, especially considering that Facebook will probably bring a lot more people to them. Facebook also says that their ultimate goal is to be the first company to have mobile chatting software with more than 1 billion subscribers all over the world. Well, if this is really their goal, they are going to have a difficult time with all other popular competitors around (such as Viber, WeChat, LINE, etc). However, I still think that this is something they can achieve (despite how overly ambitious this statement may sound). There are several reasons for this: first of all, WhatsApp still manages to retain its popularity somehow, even without the Facebook brand covering it. With all this competition around, this is a difficult task indeed. And yet they still pull it off. Another reason is the Facebook’s enormous user base. Even if some small percentage of all these users registers to WhatsApp they will have that 1 billion users in no time.