We all use WhatsApp at no cost. Of course, it never came free to Facebook – they bought it for $19 billion in 2014.
A recent purchase by Facebook for $1 billion gives a clue as to what the future is for WhatsApp – they bought a company by the name of Kustomer Inc. Apparently, the plan is to make money out of the 2 billion monthly users of WhatsApp of whom 400 million alone are in India, by selling goods and services inside WhatsApp or potentially allowing companies to use WhatsApp to handle customer services. It is something my firm will have to watch closely, because WhatsApp is hugely popular and in SA, even though in countries like the USA, where Facebook is based, the vast majority of people are not familiar with WhatsApp. WhatsApp is much bigger in countries like SA, India and Europe, but has a very small role in Facebook’s own country – probably because unlimited texts, etc have always been the order of the day in the United States and WhatsApp initially grew in countries where the mobile companies were charging a lot more for sending SMS messages as well as MMS messages. There may also be plans to use WhatsApp for payments, but in many respects that would be driven by the Indian market the most because that is the country where WhatsApp is the most popular.
|