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Comment by yeukhon | Hacker News Reader

16B? That's a B, people. While there are a lot of whatsapp users (and people have to pay to use it), wow, that's still a lot of money! How can they justify revenue that way? How can any company ever consider such acquisition? I don't even think Google can even make 16B like this.

See this discussion: http://www.quora.com/WhatsApp-Messenger/How-much-revenue-is-...

$20M net revenue, at most, right? With future expansion and side commercial services, I make $1B per year, fine. But that's after tax. So WhatsApp must make A LOT more than $1B. I really don't see anything else. But that's only when WhatsApp can continue to grow and actually gain that much of commercial income. Someone who have dealt with acquisition tells me how 16B is the right number. I would pay $5B just because WhatsApp is well-established.

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> 16B? That's a B, people.

I wanted to put the number into perspective to wrap my head around it and it seems that $19B (I've added the $3B RSUs) was the public healthcare budget for 2013 in my country of almost 40 milion citizens.

Facebook is trying to own mobile, period. That's all that matters to them and they are doing whatever they can to do it now, when it is still relatively early.

Whatsapp charges $1/year IIRC. So, with 400MM users, you can expect ~$400MM/year revenue?

AFAIK that's only the plan. right now they have very little if any revenue. People use Whatsapp because they are too poor to afford text messaging. My guess is that lots will leave even at 1 USD per year

Too poor? No. User experience, group messaging, fast picture upload.

There are 450M not 450MM. What is the double MM doing there?

Sure but then minus the operation cost, tax, etc. You get down to very little. I don't dispute FB can turn it into a revenue machine by "inventing" a new way of looking at mobile and mobile messaging, but at this stage I am afraid the revenue that I read from Quora doesn't justify a 19B total acquisition. The price is too high; Twitter is about 40B ~ 50B (http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2014/01/03/twitter-near-70-va...). So WhatsApp is at least 1/3 to 1/2 of Twitter, depending on how you look at it. And we probably can agree Twitter, FB are all about # of users; unlike Google which makes 60B revenue in 2013, Google has a real revenue model + user base. If you sell Google for $100B I won't even complain and I probably think that's a big bargain. (http://qz.com/137191/googles-record-valuation-is-still-130-b...)

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