Facebook completes a takeover of WhatsApp and the EU approves the deal

In 2009, a young man who had wanted to move from Yahoo to Facebook was refused a Brianacton interview, and 5 years later, the WhatsApp he and another colleague created was bought by Facebook at a sky-high price of $22 billion.

October 6, Beijing time, Facebook announced the completion of the acquisition of WhatsApp. The EU's unconditional ratification of the deal in early October cleared the last hurdle for the merger.

WhatsApp founder and CEO Qom (Jankoum) will join the Facebook board.

WhatsApp was founded in 2009, the current number of users have more than 450 million people, of which the proportion of active users of 70%, the daily new registered users more than 1 million people.

In February this year, Facebook submitted documents to the Securities and Futures Commission showing that the acquisition included 4 billion dollars in cash, plus 180 million shares in a-class shares. In addition, after the acquisition, Facebook will also be issued to the original WhatsApp staff of the total amount of more than 3 billion U.S. dollars of restricted equity benefits.

"WhatsApp is the only application I've ever seen that is more active than Facebook. ”

Facebookceo Zuckerberg's comments at the takeover meeting explain why Facebook has won 22 billion of billions of dollars for its flashy features, such as no games, E-commerce, friends, and no advertising, based on an annual fee for mobile applications.

WhatsApp's growth rate is equally alarming compared with Facebook. According to statistics, Facebook 4 years after the establishment of the user volume of about 150 million, only equivalent to WhatsApp the number of users in the same period of One-third. Currently, WhatsApp is already the world's largest and most active users of the Instant messaging platform, almost 70% of users daily use, Facebook users only 62% daily activity.

This poses a huge threat to Facebook, which has been working to connect internet people with information.

"The acquisition will not only solve the problem of the loss of Facebook's young users, but in the long run, these active users can become a very important asset for Facebook on the mobile internet." "In addition, in the context of the same bid for WhatsApp with Google, the acquisition also wiped out a potentially strong competitor for Facebook," a U.S. stock analyst told the first financial daily. ”

And Cheetah Mobile CEO Fu also believes that the logic of Facebook's bid is not assets, revenues, users, but the possibility of subversion. "The most important thing is the time cost, from its own and future development, FACEBOOK220 billion dollar acquisition WhatsApp in fact is to strengthen their own advantages, especially in the core areas of the alligator, once the emergence of the entrepreneurial leadership opportunities, is very dangerous." If you can use funds to solve the time barrier, it is also worth it. ”

How to run a business that is not based on advertising may be a big challenge for Facebook after buying WhatsApp. But for now, Facebook is not rushing to WhatsApp and line-like platform commercial expansion on its own, but rather to maintain its long-standing model of charging 0.99 of dollars a year and focusing on expanding the size of its users.

(Responsible editor: Lvguang)