WhatsApp crests 800 million users

WhatsApp Y'all? A monster drive to 800 million users is what the company announced on Friday, although the information itself was not on the WhatsApp Blog, you would have thought that might have been a good place to announce it. The company is a little over six years old. In other words, if this were a little human (I have good recent experience with little people of this age), they would be in their first year of school. They would recognise words and numbers, reading would come next year. Not on the Facebook platform ever, not via their investor relations pages. So where was the "official" release that WhatsApp had passed through that milestone? Via a Facebook post by co-founder of WhatsApp, Jan Koum. I took a screen grab of the post, for the simple reason of who liked it:



Strangely I follow Jan Koum and missed this, I am obviously not very good at Facebook. If there is a such a thing as "being good" at Facebook. The growth continues to amaze, WhatsApp I think was responsible for the breakdown of the popularity of the messaging platforms such as BBM and MXit to an extent. Back in early January Jan Koum announced that the messaging app had passed 700 million, and that the platform was available for 30 billion messages. Since Facebook announced that they were buying the messaging service -> Facebook to Acquire WhatsApp in February of last year, the number of users has swelled from 450 million to 800 million in 14 months. The purchase price was 19 billion Dollars, 12 billion in shares initially and another 3 billion later, vesting over four years, the rest (4 billion Dollars) cash.

Jan Koum and co-founder Brian Acton have been at it since February of 2009. Both were former employees of Yahoo! and famously failed to land jobs at Facebook. Irony is sometimes very sweet, right? So sweet actually that Koum and Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg ironed out the details of the purchase over a box of chocolate covered stories, according to a Forbes article that I read. The first year the service is free, thereafter it is 1 Dollar (or 99 cents) per user, so 800 million Dollars, not everyone pays apparently however. I guess there is a fair amount of costs associated with the messaging servers, the employees don't come cheap either is my best guess. When the business was bought, there were roughly 32 engineers in a workforce of 55. Perhaps more insight in the Facebook numbers, which arrive and cross our screens Wednesday after the market closes. And to think that Instagram was bought for a "mere" 1 billion Dollars (300 million in cash and 23 million shares at the time of the Facebook listing), the platform now has 300 billion users, as at December 2014.

According to Marketwatch, 53 analysts cover the stock, in terms of the estimates, the share price trades at 42 times current year estimates and 31 times next years estimates. The founder Mark Zuckerberg turns 31 in around three weeks time, the same as next years earnings multiple. I think that the future is indeed very bright for this company, granted that they are going to have to work hard. Or smart. Or both.