Yep – that’s a new record for the sale of an app… Of course this app just happens to have 450 million users per month, and unbelievable growth. Following is an excerpt from an article by Harry McCracken posted in the February 19, 2014 ediiton of techland.time.com.
Facebook is buying WhatsApp, the wildly popular communications app for smartphones that has 450 million users a month. The price it’s paying is $19 billion: $12 billion in Facebook stock, $4 billion in cash and $3 billion in restricted stock units. Even in an era of stunning prices for hot startups, that’s a stunner. (Was it really less than two years ago that the $1 billion Facebook paid for Instagram sounded like an epic price?)
This is by far the biggest tech-related deal since AOL agreed to buy Time Warner in 2000 for $160 billion — a deal that was far more epic, but which involved venerable, highly profitable assets such as TV networks, movie studios, cable-TV systems and (*cough cough*) magazines rather than one really popular app.
