Earlier this year Facebook announced that they would be acquiring instant messenger app WhatsApp for a cool $19 billion. With an acquisition that size and with the amount of money involved, it is only natural that regulators will want to take a closer look at the deal before giving it the greenlight.
Now over in the US, the regulators have since given Facebook and WhatsApp the go signal, and it looks like the EU will be joining them. According to a report from Reuters, the EU has recently given its approval for the Facebook-WhatsApp deal, and according to the European Commissioner, he believes that with so many alternatives out there like Line, Viber, iMessage, and so on that the deal won’t hamper competition.
With the US and EU regulators having given their blessing, it is only a matter of time before the deal is officially concluded and with WhatsApp being welcomed into Facebook’s fold. With Facebook numbering over 1 billion active mobile users and with WhatsApp boasting 600 million active users, safe to say that the combination of both their userbase will be huge, although chances are many of them already overlap.
However as Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg has recently stated, he believes that WhatsApp has the potential to reach as many as 2-3 billion users in the next few years. Whether or not that will happen remains to be seen.