Rakuten aims to integrate Viber with the other online services in its ‘Rakuten ecosystem’ which currently includes 200 million users, especially to expand the linkage between messaging and transactions. The company also announced 2013 profits of $208 million (JPY21.1 billion). Rakuten will pay cash for the deal, largely financed by its own reserves and bank borrowings. At that price Rakuten has a market capitalization of some $18.9 billion (JPY1.93 trillion), compared with Facebook’s $173 billion. They marked Rakuten’s shares down by 14% to JPY 1,499 on Monday, the first trading session after the announcement, and the shares continued to sink to JPY1,462 in Thursday trading after the Facebook announcement. 1 internet services company,” Rakuten said in a statement. Viber’s globally popular messaging service is seeing a rapid increase in numbers of registered users, and this will strengthen our digital strategy. In the past, consumers had been using conventional televisions and fixed line telephones for contents as a means of communication, but this has been shifting to mobile contents and apps. “The company decided to acquire Viber to strengthen its global platform through the use of Viber’s range of customers in the company’s e-commerce and digital contents services. Viber grew from a base in Israel and is now Cyprus-domiciled.
Rakuten, which is one of the world’s largest home shopping groups, Friday unveiled its agreed $900 million takeover of Viber, an instant messaging and VoiP operator with over 100 million active monthly users. That now makes last week’s purchase of rival message service Viber by Japanese giant Rakuten look prescient. HONG KONG – The rivalry between global internet conglomerates to get into messaging was underlined by Facebook’s proposed $19 billion acquisition of WhatsApp.
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