[TECHNOLOGY DAY] Xbox, Apple, and Playstation conferences today

Not "hard enough" considering they got outbid by nearly double.

Of course, the WhatsApp $19 billion purchase seemed really high at the time... but you got to hand it to Zuckerberg and team. While even today, without that strong monetization yet, it still might not "technically" be worth $19 billion, it now has more than 1 billion users. That's crazy.. basically in line with gmail user count. It's an ecosystem play, and when you consider the importance of mobile messaging, which was obvious two years ago as well, even considering the $10 billion offer was a crazy premium and the $19 billion offer was a crazy crazy crazy premium, it seemed like a move Google should have been more astute to make.

 

At what point do you stop? Should Google have offered $30bil or $38bil?

 

Maybe... I'm not sure... clearly you do have to stop at some point.

But I think the fact that they got offered $19 billion, and just two years later it doesn't seem "that" crazy... or even crazy at all.

Consider Line, the popular Asian chat app, has under 220 million users and made $1.2 billion in 2015 - we know this because they are about to IPO, or at least filed. Line looks to have passed its huge popularity surge, so is probably going public too late, but in either case it shows there are paths to meaningfully monetize messaging user base. Again, WhatsApp now has over a billion users.

I get its easy to play armchair quarterback... but that's the point of the analysis. They made a mistake in their projections regarding growth and valuation, clearly.

 

Rcs is here!