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Facebook's $19 billion acquisition of messaging service WhatsApp was the biggest deal in tech
since 2001, when Time Warner and AOL merged.
The buyout has some in the tech sphere wondering: If WhatsApp could do it, why not some other
app? Like, say, BlackBerry Messenger? (Via Bloomberg)
"They've got 80 million users. It's not the 450 million that WhatsApp has, but it's a
big chunk of users all the same." (Via CTV)
Of course, WhatsApp is growing by a million users a day. CNET suggests without similar
growth, BBM doesn't rate that level of interest.
"At 80 million users, BBM lacks the scale of a WhatsApp, and as Facebook demonstrated,
valuations can rise or fall dramatically based on how large a base of users you command."
Imagine for a second Facebook bought out BlackBerry's messenger division for the same price per
user at which it just absorbed WhatsApp: $42 a user for 80 million users is $3.36 billion.
That's getting close to BlackBerry's existing market cap.
TechnoBuffalo says that could be the reason BlackBerry climbed in after-hours trading
following the WhatsApp deal.
"The WhatsApp acquisition shows the value of BlackBerry and, more specifically, the
value of BlackBerry Messenger and its users. ... There are probably investors out there
who think the firm is undervalued."
At time of writing, BlackBerry's stock is up more than 5 percent — a free quarter-billion
dollars in market cap, simply for existing alongside WhatsApp. (Via Google)
Looking past the short-term boost, it's not clear how BlackBerry plans to grow its messenger
business.
A recent report in the The Wall Street Journal said BlackBerry was looking to focus on the
enterprise market but didn't go into specifics.