Messaging company WhatsApp has been acquired by social network Facebook for $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. In case the acquisition does not go through due to regulatory approvals, Facebook will pay WhatsApp $1 billion in cash and issue WhatsApp Facebook’s Class A common stock shares worth to $1 billion. Stats: WhatsApp had 450 million active users at the time of acquisition, with 320 million of them using the service on a daily basis. It had announced in December that it has 30 million active users in India and close to a million users are installing the app every day. It also processes 50 billion messages, 600 million photos, 200 million voice messages, 100 million video messages on a daily basis, with all these factors growing at a rate of 100% year-on-year. According to Sequoia Capital, Whatsapp adds over a million users a day, has a daily active user base of 72%, and at 32 engineers, one Whatsapp developer supports 14 million users. The company has zero marketing spends, and all marketing has been done by its partners (typically, telecom operators) India Connection: Neeraj Arora (twitter, LinkedIn), Heads business for Whatsapp. He was previously an M&A lead for Google, initially working in the M&A team at Google India, before moving to Mountain View as Principal, Corporate…
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