Facebook Buy WhatsApp For £11.4bn – Google & Goldman Sachs Miss Out!

The world’s largest social networking giant just got bigger. Facebook has purchased the mobile messaging platform, WhatsApp, for a massive $19 billion.

To date, Facebook’s largest purchase was Instagram a while back for one billion dollars which came along with approximately 100 million users. Facebook’s $3bn bid for SnapChat was turned down, until just a mere 11 days ago, a deal for WhatsApp was floated.

The payment is rumoured to have been broken down into $4bn cash, $12bn in Facebook shares and the remaining $3bn to be settled at a later date.

WhatsApp has only 50 employees and Facebook has kept $3bn to try and keep the platform running with the existing staff.

Facebook WhatsApp

WhatsApp has always prided itself to be advertising and gimmick free – and for now it seems that Facebook will be happy to play along – but surely there will be a point when they will need to find a way to monetize the world’s most popular cross-platform messaging application.

The 450 million worldwide active users makes WhatsApp planet Earth’s largest messaging platform. It’s so big, it dwarfs the number of users on Blackberry Messenger and Viber combined – and if it was a country it would be the third largest.

Reports have also suggest that this vast catalogue of active global users also led to interest from internet giant Google who put in a last-minute ditch bid in excess of the £11.4bn Facebook paid. There are also reports that financial institution Goldman Sachs was also interested in buying the company.

There are speculations of Google offering WhatsApp financial incentives to “stay independent” because WhatsApp was a threat to Facebook.

The only question remains is which internet giant plays his cards next? So far, Facebook has been winning every round.

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