Rakuten, one involving Japan’s largest World wide web companies, has announced that it will acquire messaging request Cyprus-based Viber regarding $900 million.
The offer is the most recent and largest in a aggressive acquisition spree by Rakuten mainly because it seeks to “become this world’s No. 1 Net Solutions company, ” it said, and marks its entry to the global messaging market.
Viber can currently potentially add Rakuten Group’s somewhere around 225 million customers to its active user base involving 300 million new registered users.
The Rakuten-Viber pairing may pose an important new challenge to Line, which announced that will had 300 million new registered users back in November 2013 and is aiming for this 500 million motorola milestone mobiel phone in 2014. Like Line, Viber users also can purchase and send stickers one to the other, and it not long ago added Viber Out, which enables free of charge calls to portable and landline quantities. Viber’s apps will not currently have games, one of Line’s critical draws, but CEO Hiroshi Mikitani hinted that will games are component of Rakuten’s plans for that messaging service.
In a very statement, Mikitani said:
I am enormously excited to welcome Viber towards the Rakuten family. Viber delivers by far the most consistently high high quality and convenient messaging and VoIP experience offered. Additionally, Viber has introduced an excellent sticker market and has tremendous potential as a gaming platform.
During the last two years, Rakuten’s purchases have included: e-reading program Kobo for $315 thousand in cash; Speaking spanish streaming video program Wuaki. tv with an undisclosed amount; and Viki, a world-wide video streaming program that crowdsources converted subtitles, for a reported $200 thousand.
In addition to its shopping spree, Rakuten was likewise a lead investor in the $100 million spherical that valued Pinterest in $1. 5 billion in May 2012. It has also build a $10 million fund to purchase startups primarily from Southeast Asia, which is the world’s fastest-growing portable marketplaces, as very well as Taiwan.
What is the news comes just a couple of days after Viber Media denied a written report that it was a student in talks to always be acquired by a moment messaging company from Asia for $300 thousand to $400 thousand.
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