Whatsapp has turned down all the speculations regarding a Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) buyout by stating that it is not in talks with the search engine giant for the acquisition valuing approximately $1 billion.
According to recent reports there has been contact between the two companies over the past few weeks.
The rumor was denied by Whatsapp business development head Neeraj Arora as he told AllThingsD that there was no conversation between the two business groups regarding the takeover of Whatsapp.
Whatsapp was founded in 2009, and designs apps for Android, BlackBerry, iOS, Symbian, and Windows Phones. Through the app, the users can send text messages, images, audio and video messages. The number of users for this social networking app has escalated to about 100 million daily users across 250 countries on various OS.
For the first year, the WhatsApp service is free of cost for all the users who register themselves with the service. After one year, the users have to pay a small amount of $0.99 for the annual subscription.
This is not the first time that there have been talks going around about WhatsApp as a target of acquisition. There were reports in December that Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) was seeking to buy this app, but it was denied by Whatsapp.
Whatsapp stated that there has been record created on New Year’s Eve, as 7 million inbound messages were sent that day and 11 billion outbound messages were sent in the same period.
There were rumors circulating about Google planning to acquire WhatsApp on the wire yesterday. Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG)’s interest in Whatsapp is not new. The company tried its hand on acquiring WhatsApp back in December, but there was not much progress and the talks could not reach beyond the initial rounds.
However, if the search engine giant acquires the messaging service app, it would act as a synergy for Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) because it would be able to integrate its messaging service on phones powered by Android. The users at present have the facility to integrate the WhatsApp messages with the Facebook Messaging app, which brings together two services in one app with one interface
Since the app was launched in 2009, it has come a long way and has seen an immense success worldwide with 18 billion plus messages in a day.
