Facebook WhatsApp Purchase - Facebook has had the plan to buy WhatsApp and needed to have the approval of both United States and the European Union to go ahead with the purchase. The U.S. had already agreed and today, Oct. 3rd it has become a fact that the EU has given the green light on the matter as well.
Facebook, the most famous, well-known and used social network made a bid of $19 billion dollars to buy WhatsApp and according to Reuters, this is the largest landmark deal made by Facebook in its ten years of history.
WhatsApp, on the other hand, doesn't have ten years of history but more like five going for six years. It was founded in 2009, by Brian Acton and Jan Koum.
Facebook had already announced its acquisition of WhatsApp in February this year and was in the process of getting it all settled and today, that has happened.
Apparently, the European Commission is not exactly worried about the competitors of these companies. They have stated, "We have carefully reviewed this proposed acquisition and come to the conclusion that it would not hamper competition in this dynamic and growing market. Consumers will still continue to have a wide choice of consumer communications apps."
There are other companies; that is true. Still, in messaging apps the competitors of WhatsApp are WeChat and Line. And even though, for instance, Line is especially designed to make phone calls through the same messenger platform, which is something that WhatsApp still misses, WhatsApp has the larger quantity of users with 600 million, as it was stated in Forbes in August, whereas Line in April had topped the 400 million, which creates a vast difference.
But then again, Facebook is a titan of social media and it was only a matter of time before they would get into mobile messaging, which actually totaled an amount of $120 billion dollars last year, as BBC stated.
