Business- WhatsApp

About 1 out of 4 people with access to a smart phone in the world has a WhatsApp (WA). It is so common that people abandon their regular SMS, and switch to WA. The deal breaker was the purchase of WA by Facebook for $19 Billion!. That wow'd the whole world with the evaluation Facebook put on the messaging app. Some people may be right, the evaluation is ridiculous and too high. Some might might say it's appropriate.

Here's the money- with over 1 billion people on WA (14.4% of world population), and people paying 99 cents after the first year (that's $990 Million/year..not bad) and with the potential to scale it easily as it is accessible on every phone operating system  (Andriod, iOS, BBs, & Windows). This gives BBM, GroupMe and any other messaging apps out there a chase for their followers. Even Facebook tried messaging with the Facebook Messenger, it wasn't as user friendly as WhatsApp. But I believe where the real money is Secured Enterprise Messaging.

This is similar to what BBM had where the U.S govt and Corporations had BBM as their secured messaging app for confidential and sensitive communication, but the issue was- it had to be on a BlackBerry phone which wasn't popular when iPhone & Samsung were trailing the market. With slagging sales of BB phones, slow phone innovation, and poor improvements on the functionality of the BBM, WhatsApp took over. It was open to every smartphone with no restriction. The versatility and freedom liberated personal communication, and the fact you can tell if the message were sent, and now you can see if your receiver read the message (just like in BBM & iMessage) makes it even better (that's a notification option emails didn't provide). The worldwide reach was like water in the dessert in this day and age, making the world even a closer global community.

If WA gets into Enterprise Messaging, this will be the sweet pot, the gold! That's one of the ways WhatsApp can scale up to meet its $19B evaluation. With Mark Zukerberg behind the team, I'm sure that's not far from the growth strategy.

Fun Fact- Facebook paid $4B in cash to Jan Koum (CEO Of WhatsApp) and the rest in Stock.
                Facebook acquired Instagram for $1B but failed to acquire SnapChat for $3B     

*1 billion users used in the above math is assumed that all that downloaded the app, uses it.

Thanks for reading.
Ony.