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. 

Airbnb listed on the Stock Exchange yesterday in a massive IPO, where they initially listed at $68 and ended the day at $144.71.  It is a technology driven company that I believe is going to succeed, so I will certainly be investing in it, although not necessarily immediately – I am hoping the price will settle down a bit lower than that!  I think a lot of people think that Airbnb is a company where people rent out a spare room in their house, but a lot of people have taken it much further than that and have multiple units now and run it as a full-time business.  I even know one particular person who rents properties from landlords and then leases them out on Airbnb with the landlord’s permission.  So, he pays a certain amount a month and then marks it up and has a manager who runs around and make sure that everything is clean and good.  So many of these businesses are all based on the same premise in many ways just cutting out the middleman, although you could argue in this case that the middle man are hotels.  Have any of you used Airbnb and if so, have your experiences been positive or not?  Here is a fun fact – Airbnb has 4 million hosts!

Joyce Zulu was the third member of staff I ever hired and given that the second member of staff was only with me for a temporary period of 2 months Joyce was, until her death in November, was my longest ever employee.  She used to be a cleaner in the Constantia Centre, the building where my firm first started and she became a filing lady in my firm.  Her role expanded through the years and she eventually helped us with consulting with clients, often playing the role of almost a translator and eventually took on an all purposes administrative and secretarial role.  She was with my firm for 25 years and she was somebody I could rely on.  When she suddenly did not turn up at work for about 2 weeks in a row in November my wife said to me she must be seriously ill or dying, because that it was not in Joyce’s nature to simply disappear.  Joyce had even taken the trouble to write to my wife when my wife lived in Russia and she was a compassionate woman who displayed considerable empathy towards our clients. 

I am very sad that she has passed away and it has been difficult to ascertain how she passed away, but I know that she was immune compromised and it may well be that Covid-19 played a role in her death.  Rest in peace Joyce, I am shocked that you have gone so soon. Thank you for the 25 years that you spent with our firm and I do hope that your family are better off because of the time you spent with the firm -and thank you for your loyalty and dedication to me for all of those years.