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Comment by sheetjs | Hacker News Reader

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sheetjs·

Try this:

FB market cap ~170B

.75B users (EDIT: originally quoted FB 1.2B users, but that is the total count and WhatsApp quotes active users)

--> market cap implies roughly $225 per active user.

In that light, 40/AU is cheap. Even if you assume 50% overlap, 80/AU is still a deal compared to how the market values FB users

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Except Facebook is now generating a serious quarterly profit, which contributes massively to their underlying valuation.

There's no hope of WhatsApp ever justifying this purchase price, not even remotely close. Facebook shareholders just got screwed massively. This deal will be written down in a big way. Zuckerberg threw a dart at the board out of desperation.

Zuck:

http://i.imgur.com/GoA3NSp.jpg

I was using active users as a metric in my parent comment, using the same measure Facebook has 750M active users for a cost of $227USD per user.

[0]: http://investor.fb.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=821954

That only strengthens my argument: market values at ~225 / active user

And how many decades will Facebook need to make that money from its users? How many decades will it need to make it from Whatsapp?

Facebook made $2.14 / user in Q4 2013 [0]. That means they need more than 26 years to return that value.

Or they need to find a way to increase revenue greatly without alienating users too much...

[0] http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/AMDA-NJ5DZ/2971107785... (page 12)

1.2B is monthly active, 750 is daily active. FB doesn't publish just registered users.

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