Facebook $22 Billion WhatsApp Deal Buys $10 Million in Sales 

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The numbers are in for Facebook Inc.’s acquisition of mobile-messaging application WhatsApp Inc.: The social network paid $22 billion for a startup that generated $10.2 million in revenue last year.

In a regulatory filing yesterday, Facebook disclosed WhatsApp’s financial results for 2012 and 2013. The messaging service, which reached 400 million active users in December, generated less than 3 cents in revenue for each one last year. By comparison, Facebook paid $55 per user when it acquired the company. WhatsApp’s net loss was $138.1 million for 2013.

Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said he’s in no rush to make money from WhatsApp, or Facebook’s other growing applications, until they reach 1 billion users.

“The right strategy is to focus on connecting the people before aggressively turning them into businesses,” he said yesterday on a conference call to discuss Facebook’s third-quarter earnings. “Once we get to that scale, then we think they will start to become meaningful businesses in their own right.”

WhatsApp’s revenue growth is going in the right direction – – sales more than doubled last year from $3.82 million in 2012. The app now has more than half a billion users, and revenue for the first half of this year reached $15.3 million, Facebook said yesterday.

The unit’s losses are still widening — its net loss for the six months that ended in June was $232.5 million.

Source: bloomberg-Facebook $22 Billion WhatsApp Deal Buys $10 Million in Sales

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