Facebook buys Whatsapp

Facebook buys Whatsapp for $19 billion Dollar why??

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has released a statement explaining why his company has paid $19bn for mesaging service WhatsApp. Here is the release in full.

Here are some words from Mark Zuckerberg : 

"I’m excited to announce that we’ve agreed to acquire WhatsApp and that their entire team will be joining us at Facebook.Our mission is to make the world more open and connected. We do this by building services that help people share any type of content with any group of people they want. WhatsApp will help us do this by continuing to develop a service that people around the world love to use every day.

      WhatsApp is a simple, fast and reliable mobile messaging service that is used by over 450 million people on every major mobile platform. More than 1 million people sign up for WhatsApp every day and it is on its way to connecting 1 billionn people. More and more people rely on WhatsApp to communicate with all of their contacts every day.

     WhatsApp will continue to operate independently within Facebook. The product roadmap will remain unchanged and the team is going to stay in Mountain View. Over the next few years, we're going to work hard to help WhatsApp grow and connect the whole world. We also expect that WhatsApp will add to our efforts forInternet.org, our partnership to make basic internet service affordable for everyone.

     WhatsApp will complement our existing chat and messaging services to provide new tools for our community. Facebook Messenger is widely used for chatting with your Facebook friends, and WhatsApp for communicating with all of your contacts and small goups of people. Since WhatsApp and Messenger serve such different and important uses, we will continue investing in both and making them each great products for everyone.

     WhatsApp had every option in the world, so I’m thrilled that they chose to work with us. I’m looking forward to what Facebook and WhatsApp can do together, and to developing great new mobile services that give people even more options for connecting.

     I've also known Jan [Koum, WhatsApp founder and chief executive] for a long time, and I know that we both share the vision of making the world more open and connected. I'm particularly happy that Jan has agreed to join the Facebook board and partner with me to shape Facebook's future as well as WhatsApp's.

     Jan and the WhatsApp team have done some amazing work to connect almost half a billion people. I can’t wait for them to join Facebook and help us connect the rest of the world."

     In a statement released late on Wednesday, Facebook said it is buying Mountain View, California-based WhatsApp for $4 billion in cash and $12 billion worth of Facebook shares. As part of the acquisition, WhatsApp founders and employees will get another $3 billion in Facebook stock that they can cash in after four years.

     WhatsApp will continue to co-exist as an autonomous company, Zuckerberg told investors in a conference call, adding the Facebook messaging service Messenger was not a rival.

     Facebook has moved aggressively in recent years to catch up with the global shift towards mobile from desktop computing. It paid $1 billion to acquire Instagram in 2012.

It tried, and failed, to buy Snapchat for $3 billion in 2013.

     Both companies refused to give geographical breakdowns of subscribers, but BGR, a tech news service, has reported that WhatsApp had 35 million users in India in January, picking up 5 million in just a month.

     This wildly popular app, which is free in the first year, is among many messaging services that enable smartphone users to go around their cellular texting plans that come with costs and caps.