Someone mentioned about trying to find out if their have ever been any other chat services that have really made a lot of money on it's own, and it sparked memory of an acquisition that didn't happen quite that long ago, Microsoft buying Skype in 2011, and here is a good recent article about it:
• Problems monetising it: revenues at the time – $860m for the year, losses of $7m – amounted to just $1.30 per user per year
So, here we have a company, at acquisition, that was making close to the $1 per year per user that WhatsApp is charging. At the end of 2010 skype had 663 million users and was acquired for $8.5 billion. That's $12.82 a user.
Then, as now with WhatsApp, people are questioning whether Microsoft would ever make enough money to justify such a price. Then, as now, people justified the price based on the sort of intangibles (getting rid of a competitor, strengthening the brand, tapping new markets, etc.) the WhatsApp acquisition is being justified with now.
But there is still the big difference that Facebook, with a business in a similar space (obviously still different but they both are chat/communication based), with a similar revenue model per user per year, but only 3 years later purchased it for $42.22 per user. That's almost 4x the price for a similar acquisition 3 years apart.
And people thought Microsoft was crazy for the price they paid for Skype ... it kind of makes you wonder what the hell is going on.
Sales, marketing, accounting, legal, and financial controllership are going to skyrocket when this company has a revenue stream that is worth NPV=$19B.
This is a credit to the company; who like instagram was able to build much value with few FTE's. But building a company "worth money" and building a company "making money" are really different things.
This is smart from a founder's perspective, because in a sense all of those other employees would just be dilutive of attention and likely equity. But from an economic perspective, it's jumping the gun a bit to conclude what the steady state economics will be.
Assuming Google/Apple maintain respective strangleholds, continue to share the wealth, etc. The "app store" craze could fizzle out, nobody knows for sure.
WhatsApp didn't have "no revenue", they had a much simpler revenue stream.. But your point stands. No doubt a lot of Skype's operation costs were the business and marketing side of things.
It seems these types of transactions have nothing to do with potentials profits, but with power over users, or "lying on a bed of weeds and ripping them out before they strangle you".
And with not paying tax - Microsoft has all this money sitting in Europe that it has to pay tax on if it returns to shareholders, or it can waste it on buying companies instead.
Speculation - pure and simple. its an easy sell at the moment to executives and financial types who don't understand how computers work. The reality is that all these services (just like icq) are simple to replace and will only become moreso. if you try to make more than a trickle of income users will turn away. it won't pan out long term for many of these big purchases.
Skype's use prevails mostly around international calling, video conferencing and professional chats. It isn't really an everyday use thing like WhatsApp which, where dominating, is an entire replacement of SMS. My Skype account gets sparingly used for anything else than talking to a client.
They already have 400 million users, and their growth might continue. But there are only 7 billion people on earth, they are running out of room to prove that valuation. Even if they literally sign up every single person on earth, that's still more than a few dollars per person in revenue required to make the $20 billion valuation worthwhile.
On the other hand, Google is investing massively in "next big thing" r&d, and even if all its efforts to create new markets fail, it's likely to still be a major player in adtech in 33 years time.
WhatsApp has staggering growth on the basis you don't have to pay for it and its founders are hostile towards advertising, neither of which lend you towards thinking it'll ever reach the 33x P/E ratio (actual P/E ratio >800) still less be significant in 33 years time.
Not sure where to start. What you say isn't even wrong, exactly.
1) You seem to think that the price/earnings ratio has something to do with how the company will do in (P/E) years. It doesn't. As a specific example, companies that are takeover targets have higher PE ratios than they would otherwise, even though they probably won't exist soon.
2) Generally companies with high growth trade at high PE ratios. That's why Google has such a high ratio (it's unclear if you understand this). WhatsApp has even higher growth. AFAIK WhatsApp's revenue is not publicly known, and I'm estimating it at $200m for next year[1].
3) Where are you getting "actual P/E ratio >800"? You know WhatsApp's revenue?
Edit: I see WhatsApp revenue was $20M last year[2]. With growth rates like they are seeing I don't think this says much other than that the revenue model works.
WhatsApp is much better than Skype as an acquisition.
1. It's a single-purpose, specialised application which makes it hard to compete against. Once you can't subtract anymore from a software you are left with the essence of it. If you build that rock-solid you can eliminate any competitive threat on the product front. Kind of like unix utilities.
2. On the network front they played smartly by going after your phone book which makes them network agnostic (Skype, FB, Google, iMessage, BBM are all stuck within their own walls). At this point WhatsApp can just sit back and let network-effects do the work (they have spent 0 on marketing to date).
Between 1 & 2, competing with WhatsApp is hard and they are resilient to disruption. That's a great relief for any tech acquisition.
Another thing I like about WhatsApp is that they didn't do a whole lot other than fixing SMS. They did this by adding group messaging and reducing costs. And for now at least, I don't get any marketing spam on WhatsApp like I do over SMS.
Skype's shelf life was always questionable to me. It was and will remain relatively easier to disrupt.
Fixing SMS is the interesting thing. GroupMe was bought by Skype for many millions, and the key thing about GroupMe was supposedly fixing SMS. But I have no idea what happened to GroupMe after that acquisition. Like many startups, perhaps acquisition was death for them, although it seemed to me that would make little sense for Skype's motivations. I don't think they would have been simply looking for talent the way acquihires usually do.
One thing many people failed to take into account in the skype deal was that was cash sitting in overseas accounts and had microsoft repatriated those funds they would have been hit with a 30% tax or something on them. By buying an overseas asset they effectively got a huge discount on their money.
Is it insane to speculate that pressure is coming from government agencies? In a talk at Fosdem Poul-Henning Kamp talks about the pretty insane timeline with skype and how much it potentially benefited the NSA.
I still remember back in 2000 when we still had AOL. I was eight or nine and I had my own aol account. You could have a dozen or so sub accounts on the main one. And because it was a "kids account" there were chat rooms for kids. Being the lovely kid that I was, of course I went into one and was like "how the f*ck are you all?"
Well the kid chat rooms were moderated and our entire AOL account was disabled. My mom had to call to have it re-enabled and of course they told her what I had said.
I remember I used to enter the chat rooms by saying "Ever dance with the devil in the pale moon light?" Being a popular quote from the original Batman movie and it went well with my screen name (xsatanx) it usually got a laugh...
... until I stumbled into a religious chat room.
Got my account disabled and had to have my mom call as well.
when my folks got me a modem, the only thing my father made me understand was the phone bill values... i was 7 or younger. learned all about initialization strings and the minimal about terminal emulation to get to the message and mud games part of some bbs. after that it was downhill.
I developed a serious internet addiction when I was a teenager. My parents were working class and struggling to make ends meet, and I was always dreading the day the phone bill arrived. After a couple of confiscated modems (I had a secret backup box of old 28.8s), I realized I could just trade my web skills for money and pay the bills myself. I guess that's what I've been doing since.
This sounds pretty similar to my experience. Confiscated modems rang a bell! I've also dreaded the day the phone bill came. A friend and me used all kinds of workarounds: Free AOL CDs, Toll Free Dailup numbers where the banking data was not validated in time... got serious trouble (rightly so) for that. Not much later I got a small job and we had 64k ISDN there, later at that time insanely fast DSL 384k. Learned Linux at age 13, Debian 1.3, Redhat 5, I now make a living of that... The addiction is still there, through.
webskills only existed some half decade later or more...
one thing i learned fast was that a 1 line dial in bbs had good attendence, so i started to run mine after some time. was interesting, and damn cheap since nothing beats free
I assume the motivation for pulling this out of the archive is the WhatsApp purchase. However, I don't think this comparison is truly fair. Not only is WhatsApp monthly adding over twice the userbase ICQ had at the time of purchase, but it is also actually collecting revenue from them. WhatsApp is a real company with real monetization strategies.
ICQ in 1999 had about 45 million users. There were only 248 million internet users back in 1999. That's 18% of mostly international users.
AOL was optimistic. So much so this is the actual response when they beat the street during their earning reports.
"(ICQ is) growing like a weed," said AOL President Bob Pittman. "Monetizing it" will be "relatively easy," he added.
WhatsApp has 450 million users where there are 2.7 billion internet users. 16%. Of mostly international users. Where, again, monetizing it, should be relatively easy.
But then again, why does any of this matter?
Genie's out of the bottle. The game has changed. We're playing a game of scaling now. Less than a hundred dedicated folks can change the world.
That 19 billion is a clarion call to attract even more people to what it is most of us here have been doing for decades.
If there is to be a singularity moment for the generation that grew up remembering the difference between real life and internet life, we have arrived at the internet life.
Yes. Met Yair and Sefi (two of tech founders) via my uncle who was doing biz Dev for them. I was writing a shareware win32 app at the time called "AoLOL!", an add on for AOL 2.5 and up that would extend the AOL toolbar and add a bunch of features. One of those features was called "keep in touch". You could specify a list of AOl screen names and it would run through that list and perform AOL'd "check if online" function. It would tell you if your friends are online and of so, what chat room they're in (if any). A precursor to the "buddy list."
The icq guys are Israeli. My parents are Israeli. I spoke Hebrew fluently. I helped them fix the broken English on their web site. Later I gave them access to my AOL account so they could take a close look at AOL's buddy list when it did launch.
They also offered me UIN (the icq #) "007". I laughed it off, didn't even know at the time what 007 meant.
Always wondered what would have been if I was a few years older, not living with my parents, able to drive, and would have taken their offer seriously. To me they really kicked off the dotcom boom and for me, my focus in startups.
It surprises you? Pretty big chance that a programmer once offered an ICQ job is on HN these days and would comment in a thread about the Mirabilis purchase.
ICQ was revolutionary at the time. Both in terms of early-game instant messaging, and the deal these guys struck with AOL. I remember everybody talking about it in Israel at the time. (iirc) Four founders in their early twenties each making around $40mil was quite a shock.
Even though it's a bit sad to see things didn't really evolve much since then, the bubble bursted a little later, and those kind of eyeballs-based "business-models" collapsed. I wonder if these kind of deals are the canary of another bubble bursting?
This is key. People seem to forget that 15 years ago the Internet was new and not many people used it or had access to it.
I imagine that in 15 years (fingers crossed) we'll reflect the same situation where we assume everyone has access to the Internet and not just several billion people :)
I remember when switching from ICQ to Microsoft Messenger thinking "good riddance". Messenger employed the not the least bit novel approach of letting users sign in using a self selected textual screen name.
My god those were awesome. A great friend of mine typed in his name, Ben LastName. It said it was taken, but how about Ovenproof Ben? Mine was also taken, how about Mucous Robin? Both have stuck. Its name generator was fantastically random.
I can't believe I can remember mine as well (10407923). I don't even remember my old phone number that I had at the time, or the address of where I lived!
I'm not sure that's a fair comparison to make. Most of their revenue comes after the first year. With the growth they had last year and current growth, their revenue should exponentially rise over 2014 and 2015.
Also, I wonder if being bought by facebook could help reduce hardware costs by utilizing facebook's infustracture
Whatsapp makes extremely little revenue right now - like it would take Facebook hundreds of years to recuperate what they paid [1]. Even if it doubles in user-base and grows by an order of magnitude (on top of that) through some magic Facebook monetization strategy, it would still take them decades.
But if we discount the fact that Facebook mostly paid their own "worthless" (mostly overhyped/overvalued) stock for this overvalued Whatsapp acquisition, then maybe with an order of magnitude profit, they could recover the money somewhere between 10-20 years.
For Facebook's sake, they better hope some other new disruptive technology doesn't come along in the next 10-20 years, because they won't be able to keep this sort of acquisition strategy for long.
I've noticed some articles call Facebook/Zuckerberg "smart" for noticing Whatsapp is disrupting them - if you can call noticing a disruption so late in the game that you now have to pay $19 billion to buy it, and with almost zero expectations of recovering the bulk of the money in the next decade.
What would be much smarter is using your own engineers to build that next disruption, or at least buy the ones appearing very early in the game. Zuckerberg could've bought tens of such apps in their early days a few years ago, and he'd still be much better off today. He could've owned Whatsapp, Kik, Viber, Line, and many others for much less.
[1] - Analysis of Whatsapp's revenue and profit when it had half the user-base it has today:
"What would be much smarter is using your own engineers to build that next disruption"
Could they, though? Facebook's DNA is information accumulation. As is Google's.
WhatsApp is the antithesis of this, and the likely outcome of this acquisition is the gradual decline of the product as people flock to whatever new, unburdened, anonymous replacement comes along.
But for a while it will boost the stock price because it keeps user engagement seemingly high.
WhatsApp had revenues of $20 million last year -- clearly much lower than their userbase -- and from reports on here most people were unaware any $1 per year thing even existed. Their site doesn't seem to even mention the $1 thing, but instead declares -- without time restriction -- that it is entirely free.
I don't even know what email my account uses, but I was able to log in to my account via the web UI, I'm more surprised that I remember my password than I am that I remembered the account number :)
52535425. And then I was so angry when that "children under 13 can't use the internet" or whatever act went into effect and I got locked out of it (young and stupid enough to put my real birth date!). I made a new account but can't remember the ID, I stopped using it pretty quickly after that.
I think it was due to how you tell people to add you as a friend. There was a search you could do but if you had a common name there would be multiple matches (and I don't think there were photos or a count of mutual friends to help you figure out which one) and perhaps it might have been easier than telling someone to look you up via email (especially since email addresses were often random words rather than first.last@gmail.)
I'm going to speculate that this is a very strategic move from Facebook. Remember BlackBerry Messenger? one of the early selling points of the phone was that BBM let you communicate for free, instantly, with people all over the world. It was pretty revolutionary at it's time.
Facebook is already becoming the world's phonebook. Connect with someone and you have a way to contact them.
Facebook is also heavily pushing it's messaging app on the main Facebook app. I think that WhatsApp will be integrated with (or replace) Facebook messenger.
This combination builds a powerful base for an eventual Facebook phone with a free data/voice plan (the phone would have a base price, but service would be free thanks to the sale of ads ala Kindle Special Offers). Think about it -- if you could call, text, and message all of your contacts, for free, from within the Facebook app, why wouldn't you do it?
If Facebook follows that strategy, they will get their 19 billion out of this deal for sure.
Well, 300M for 12M users, which is a lot fewer than the services that get bought for big numbers today.
But magnitude of the money aside, has an online messaging service ever been able to really turn a huge profit? chongli points out that AOL eventually sold ICQ for less than they paid, and I can't think of any others off the top of my head (AIM didn't prevent AOL from being overtaken by Facebook, say). They seem to be very un-sticky in terms of user retention by their nature.
Apparently it wasn't a bad according to wiki (but the source is in German, so I can't confirm if it's true):
> Orey Gilliam,[6] who also assumed the responsibility for all of AOL's messaging business in 2007, ICQ resumed its growth and turned into a highly profitable company, and one of AOL's most successful businesses.
> has an online messaging service ever been able to really turn a huge profit?
You could make the argument that Tencent did, as some are apparently doing when comparing them to Snapchat and seeing visions of billions dancing in their muddled heads.
But that ignores the Asia factor. Where it's not uncommon to find one conglomerate company making toasters, lamp shades, bars of soap, and rockets. Tencent makes video games and they also run the equivalent of PayPal. And, of course, they pimp out their cuuuuute mascot. Since, you know, it's Asia. WhatsApp has a generic-looking icon and no mascot. They are pretty much doomed.
$19 billion and whatsapp has 465 million users, and ICQ was purchased for $287 million had 12 million users at the time. $40 dollars per user vs $24 dollars per user.
Now if the goal were to acquire users. its far more likely that facebook would have a huge overlap in the number of users it has already and those on whatsapp. That means maybe a cost of acquisition at let's completely speculate $100 dollars per user(maybe more). It seems kind of silly. but then you think about their penetration in developing markets and network effects... I don't know I'm not zuck.
BUT on a complete tangent of my comment. I should start an Israeli chat company. they've had some big exits.
If you can call a P/E of 800+ "very profitable"? Making $20M a year profit is no small thing at all, and I'm sure if it was bought for a billion, you'd see far less comments on the subject.
Goes to show that only 20 Million out of 430M paid the $1/year (which has something to do with it not being charged everywhere and people having a 1 year grace period and a majority of their target market having no credit card (young audience in emerging markets)).
Let's see how Zuckerberg plans to change that drastically.
32 employees * 100,000 = 3.2 million
Let's say a million a year for office space and another million for infrastructure and bandwidth, seems like they were fairly profitable for what they had. No idea how Facebook plans to recoup $20 billion though.
Twitter generates about $2M in revenue a day. And they make nothing since they're not profitable. So compared to Twitter, WhatsApp is undefined profitable.
Is it bad that I can still remember my 7 digit ICQ number? It's probably been over 14 years since I've used it. I use to judge everyone that used AIM but eventually I switched over to AIM because all my friends in school had AIM.
I have a 6 digit also. It's kind of funny because I had forgotten my password but remembered the number, and I saw that I had my old ISP's email address in there so I couldn't reset it. What I did was sign up for a trial dialup account on my old ISP so I would get assigned the same email address, and then did the password reset and cancelled the ISP account. Just so I could keep my 6 digit icq number.
It's funny how these ICQ like messenger applications always end up being bought out with heaps of money. When you see it all over for the nth time than its just funny.
I mean: you are supposed to learn a real profession so that you will be able to create real value, whereas real value is actually assigned to messenger apps.
12834982 -- can't believe I can still remember it. I haven't signed on in well over a decade. Kinda proud, not gunna lie. And according to Google, my last nickname was "Blake's Alright", must have been going through some teenage melancholy at the time, haha
And since this is HN, you probably wonder where the ICQ founders are now? As far as I know, 3.5 out of 4.5 (one quit early) are busy having fun and enjoying life, and the remaining one has since started and sold companies for $100m each at the rate of about one per two years.
Just a naive comparison, AOL paid ~24MM/user for ICQ. Facebook is paying ~42.3MM/user for WhatsApp. That's about 76% more. IRC wasn't making any money when it was acquired. WhatsApp was making some.
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/aug/30/skype-micr...
The bullet point that stands out for me is this:
• Problems monetising it: revenues at the time – $860m for the year, losses of $7m – amounted to just $1.30 per user per year
So, here we have a company, at acquisition, that was making close to the $1 per year per user that WhatsApp is charging. At the end of 2010 skype had 663 million users and was acquired for $8.5 billion. That's $12.82 a user.
Then, as now with WhatsApp, people are questioning whether Microsoft would ever make enough money to justify such a price. Then, as now, people justified the price based on the sort of intangibles (getting rid of a competitor, strengthening the brand, tapping new markets, etc.) the WhatsApp acquisition is being justified with now.
But there is still the big difference that Facebook, with a business in a similar space (obviously still different but they both are chat/communication based), with a similar revenue model per user per year, but only 3 years later purchased it for $42.22 per user. That's almost 4x the price for a similar acquisition 3 years apart.
And people thought Microsoft was crazy for the price they paid for Skype ... it kind of makes you wonder what the hell is going on.