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Mark Zuckerberg Chief Executive Officer of Facebook Inc., said that WhatsApp Inc., which his social-media company bought, according to Bloomberg News, was “worth more than $19 billion.” Facebook will pay $4 billion in cash, $12 billion in Facebook shares and $3 billion in restricted stock units to be granted to WhatsApp founders and employees that will vest over four years. WhatsApp is a messaging service, which transmits users’ text and video messages via their Internet data plan, and is especially popular with young and overseas users. Unlike traditional text messages, which consumers pay for through their mobile-phone plans, WhatsApp is free for the first year, and costs 99 cents a year after that.
NBC News has reported that Mark Zuckerberg Has called WhatsApp the “most engaging app that we’ve ever seen exist on mobile by far,” and pointed out “there are very few services that reach one billion in the world.” According to the Financial Times, WhatsApp “has done to SMS on mobile phones what Skype did to international calling on landlines.”
The Facebook founder announced the deal that joins his social network of 1.2 billion active users with Whatsapp’s 450 million users. Zuckerberg said Facebook planned to leave the WhatsApp service unchanged. It has been widely reported that Facebook’s acquisition of WhatsApp was closely related to the Internet.org vision.
The 29-year-old Mark Zuckerberg said, “We are absolutely not going to change plans around WhatsApp and the way it uses user data. WhatsApp is going to operate completely autonomously,” according to the L.A. Times “They might use people and infrastructure to grow, but the vision is to keep the service exactly the same. They do not keep the content you send, and we’re not going to change that.”
According to The Times of India, Mark Zuckerberg said he and WhatsApp founder Jan Koum shared a vision of connecting everyone in the world to the Internet, delivering development benefits and in the longer term profits, too.
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Image Credit: www.bloomberg.com
