Although it has less than half of that number, Zuck is confident about WhatsApp's future

Feb 20, 2014 09:12 GMT  ·  By

Mark Zuckerberg is understandably quite happy with the latest acquisition that Facebook made and he made sure to express this through a lengthy post on the social network.

“Our mission is to make the world more open and connected. We do this by building services that help people share any type of content with any group of people they want. WhatsApp will help us do this by continuing to develop a service that people around the world love to use every day,” Zuckerberg wrote.

Although WhatsApp already has 450 million users on all major mobile platforms, Zuck isn’t looking at the present stats that the popular messaging app is bragging about, but rather its potential.

“More than 1 million people sign up for WhatsApp every day and it is on its way to connecting one billion people. More and more people rely on WhatsApp to communicate with all of their contacts every day,” Zuck wrote in his post.

According to Facebook’s founder, WhatsApp will complement the existing chat and messaging services to provide new tools for the network’s community.

“Facebook Messenger is widely used for chatting with your Facebook friends, and WhatsApp for communicating with all of your contacts and small groups of people,” Zuckerberg wrote. Since the two apps serve such different and important users, the company will continue to invest in both.

The young billionaire expressed his joy about WhatsApp’s team choosing to join Facebook considering all the things they could do together, not only for their separate tools, but also when it comes to developing great new mobile services together.

Facebook has announced the acquisition of WhatsApp today for $16 billion (€13.8 billion), including $4 billion (€2.9 billion) in cash and $12 billion (€8.7 billion) worth of Facebook shares. An additional $3 billion (€2.2 billion) in restricted stock units will be granted to WhatsApp’s founders and employees over the next 4 years after the deal is complete.