WhatsApp Responds To Google Buyout Speculation
Ryan Martin / 12 years ago
Just two days ago we brought you the news that Google was reportedly planning to acquire WhatsApp for a fee upwards of $ 1 billion USD. This rumour isn’t exactly the first to concern WhatsApp and the potential for it to be bought out by a bigger company. In December last year there were rumours that Facebook would be making the acquisition and WhatsApp said that this rumour was also factually inaccurate.
WhatsApp have responded saying the Google takeover rumours are unfounded and that they have not been in talks with Google. Neeraj Arora, WhatsApp’s business development head, denied the rumour fully by stating that there had been no sales talks with Google about an acquisition.
It did almost seem counter-intuitive that Google might be looking to buy WhatsApp even though it was already investing a lot of time and money into its own equivalent yet-to-be-released service called “Babel”. Even though WhatsApp is clearly capable of growing while remaining independent there are still a lot of companies out there that could benefit from acquiring it.
Some have cited that Yahoo might be well placed to acquire WhatsApp as Yahoo certainly needs to bolster up on the mobile front if it wants to remain competitive in today’s marketplace.
WhatsApp is one of the most popular mobile applications in the world for cross-platform messaging. The app allows photo, video, text, audio and location sharing between all mobile operating systems it supports. The app costs $0.99 on iOS and in some countries $0.99 per year on the Android OS.
