Michal Ždanský IM and VoIP service Viber it has a new owner. It is Japan's Rakuten, one of the largest online stores there, which, in addition to selling goods, also offers banking services and digital services for travel. He paid over $900 million for Viber, which is almost the same amount that Facebook paid for Instagram. However, for a company with an annual turnover of around 39 billion dollars, this is not a significant sum.
Viber currently has over 300 million users in almost 200 countries around the world, including the Czech Republic, and also offers Czech localization. The service, which was created in 2010, quickly became very popular, and in 2013 alone, its user base grew by 120 percent. Although Viber is free, including calling and texting within the service, it also offers the option of classic VoIP via purchased credits, similar to Skype.
The service as such can now reach more users in Japan thanks to Rakuten, where it faces competition from WhatsApp and Skype, and it will allow the online store to reach new customers through Viber. There is no doubt that the company will use the service to promote its business in some way. However, functionality for existing users should not be affected in any way. This is far from the first major acquisition for Rakuten to expand its services, in 2011 it bought a Canadian e-book store Kobo 315 million and also invested heavily in Pinterest.
Viber understands how people want to communicate with each other and has built a single service that offers everything you need. This makes Viber the ideal platform for Rakuten's customer engagement, as we were looking for a way to bring our broad understanding of the customer to a whole new audience through our dynamic ecosystem of online services.
- Hiroshi Mikitani, CEO of Rakuten
900 million purchase ... $39 billion annual profit ... however, this is not a significant amount ...
It seems like a pretty substantial amount to me. It is a 23-year profit, which seems to me to be uneconomic for the life of the application nowadays. Of course, it is clear to me that they calculated it, but the person who sold it is more satisfied. Let's remember applications like ICQ and how popular they were and where are they today? It is not far from 23 years.
Adam Adam, you are getting it wrong, first of all they say $39 billion annual turnover not profit. And secondly, I think you misunderstood the whole thing, if we take your hypothesis with 39 billion profit, then the investment will pay for them in 15 days :)
Just... the question of how big the costs will be... the annual figure seems quite high to me when I consider that I don't think many people buy the credit there
Rakuten has that turn, not Viber.
…However, for a company with an annual turnover of around 39 billion dollars, this is not a significant sum….
Also, 39 billion ibrat can be a loss of 1 billion :-)
The turnover is decent, but still one can only speculate about the value of the "profit". But 900 million is only 2,3% of the annual turnover, which is not such a significant one-time cost item for such a company. And as a marketing tool it is a very good product. It spreads like an avalanche among phone users and all by itself, without advertising :-)