Facebook Acquires Whatsapp

Facebook Acquires Whatsapp - WhatsApp cofounder Jan Koum, that marketed his business to Facebook in 2014, has been discharging Facebook supply at a consistent clip under a prescheduled trading strategy, with new sales a number of times a month, considering that February 2016.

Facebook Buys Whatsapp

So our asked Equilar, a company that specializes in assessing exec settlement as well as business information, to assist us take a look at all the Securities and also Exchange Compensation filings related to Koum's sales for 2016.

Facebook Acquires Whatsapp


It turns out he's marketed greater than 22 million shares worth roughly $2.8 billion given that January.

Facebook agreed to purchase WhatsApp in February 2014 for over $19 billion in supply, and the price had actually risen to $22 billion by October, when the offer closed, thanks to Facebook's climbing supply rate. Koum possessed regarding 45% of the company when he offered it, Forbes approximates, which implies his take on paper had to do with $10 billion. He additionally obtained a seat on Facebook's board.

At the end of 2015, according to Facebook's yearly proxy declaring, Koum had over 60 million shares of common stock. He also had an additional 19 million limited supply units, which vest over time and also work as a reward for him to remain till November 2018.

Based upon that vesting schedule, it appears like he's gained regarding 3 million of those RSUs up until now this year.

So in general, he's sold about one-third of his present stake in Facebook this year.

Koum's supply sales come as WhatsApp remains to proliferate and also as the business is making changes to the service that could open up new moneymaking possibilities, however also runs the risk of pushing away some users.

On Thursday, Facebook introduced that WhatsApp was transforming its privacy policy for the first time considering that the purchase to allow Facebook to see the phone number that a customer shares when they sign up for WhatsApp. Facebook can use this information to enable companies to call users directly with WhatsApp, as they can currently do via Carrier, and also will certainly allow Facebook to show more appropriate ads to logged-in individuals. Nonetheless, WhatsApp said it would certainly not share these phone numbers straight with individuals.

WhatsApp passed greater than than 1 billion month-to-month individuals in February and is the most popular conversation app in more than half of the world, according to recent stats from SimilarWeb.

Facebook had no talk about the sales, as it does not talk about individuals' financial investment decisions.