Wednesday, February 19, 2014

Facebook Paying $19 Billion For Something I've Never Heard Of

Crazy:

"Facebook today announced that it has reached a definitive agreement to acquire WhatsApp, a rapidly growing cross-platform mobile messaging company, for a total of approximately $16 billion, including $4 billion in cash and approximately $12 billion worth of Facebook shares. The agreement also provides for an additional $3 billion in restricted stock units to be granted to WhatsApp's founders and employees that will vest over four years subsequent to closing."
What's app! Not much of a business if you have to buy all of your competitors.

6 comments:

Evan said...

This app is very big in Asia.

Cameron said...

It also plays second fiddle to tencent's Wechat

Anonymous said...

It's also very big in Europe. They should have scooped what's app up a while ago because the product integrates well into Facebook mobile is made for integrating ads. I'm not neither bullish on facebook, nor bearish either because they have shown good earnings growth but the P/E is too high, especially relative to LinkedIn. Twitter is another story. I've made good money shorting twitter after the IPO. Long LinkedIn short twitter works out well at the right prices.

Anonymous said...

Yes, whatsapp dominates facebook in all the major eu markets http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/19/facebook-whatsapp/

Linkedin has a 8x higher earnings multiple than facebook now so you must have been long since 2011 or 2012. Shorting twitter is a good hedge to protect that gain. Twitter has an absurd valuation. Linkedin has unimpressive margins and earnings growth but they could easily make cuts and pull back from geographic markets they are expanding into to increase margins and earnings substantially. They likely will at some point or another. Good find.

CP said...

LNKD vs TWTR

http://stockcharts.com/h-sc/ui?s=LNKD:TWTR&p=D&b=5&g=0&id=p47355652182

Joe Nelson said...

Have you followed the Blackberry story?

$4.7B market cap. It'd be multiples of that if were a start up ready to IPO tomorrow.