WhatsApp Denies Google Acquisition Rumours

Neeraj Arora, the head of business development at the popular cross-platform messaging service WhatsApp, has denied rumours his company is about to be acquired by Google.

On Sunday, “anonymous sources” hinted the search giant was offering as much as $1 billion (£653m) for the platform. The same reports claimed that WhatsApp was acting reluctantly in order to drive up the price.

A day at the mill

On Sunday, DigitalTrends reported that WhatsApp, the number one paid app on iTunes, was in the midst of talks with Google. This was consistent with the earlier rumours that Google was working on its own messaging service codenamed “Babel”, but wasn’t ready to put in effort to successfully market it.

However, Arora told AllThingsD that WhatsApp had entered no negotiations with Google. He didn’t elaborate on the topic.

In December, a similar rumour was doing the rounds, with Facebook as an apparent buyer.

WhatsApp carried a record 18 billion messages on last New Years’ Eve, and is believed to have played a crucial role in the decline of SMS messaging. It is believed that the increased use of social messaging apps had cost mobile operators $13.9 billion (£8.8bn) in lost revenues in 2011.

In March, CEO of the company Jan Koum revealed that the app, which has users in 100 countries around the world, would eventually switch to a yearly subscription model, instead of a one-off £0.69 payment.

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