Thursday, 20 February 2014 14:36

It's official, Facebook has bought WhatsApp

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Facebook has announced that they have reached a final agreement on the purchase of WhatsApp, a popular system for instant messaging via smartphone, for enormous figure of $16 billion in cash and stock (4 billion in cash and 12 billion in Facebook's stock). Additional three billion of US dollars in Facebook's shares will be offered to the founders of WhatsApp during the next four years after finalizing the contract.

From WhatsApp have confirmed this allegation, adding that WhatsApp will continue to exist as a separate application, independent from Facebook Messenger, and that they will enable Facebook to accelerate the adoption of additional connectivity to users. Jan Koum, co-founder of WhatsApp will enter the board of directors of Facebook as part of this acquisition, while the company's headquarters will remain in Mountain View, California.

In a press release sent out by Facebook on this occasion Mark Zuckerberg said that WhatsApp is on their way to connect a billion people, and that services that reaches such a thing is incredibly valuable. Currently WhatsApp has more than 450 million users worldwide, of whom 70% use the application at least once every day. The total volume of transmitted messages gets closer and closer every day to the overall SMS traffic of all mobile operators in the world.

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Read 2561 times Last modified on Thursday, 20 February 2014 14:43

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