As a user of both Facebook and Whatsapp, I found this article very intriguing. The European Union regulators recently unconditionally approved Facebook’s $19 billion purchase of the mobile-messaging service WhatsApp Inc., which had been fiercely opposed by Europe’s telecom industry. This is the largest merge in Facebook’s history and it will allow them to have a stronger presence internationally in mobile messaging.

From a consumer’s point of view, I find that this merge will benefit customers in mobile messaging as we would be able to have both of the aspects of Facebook and WhatsApp in one single mobile application. WhatsApp would be able to help Facebook create a more easy and useful way of mobile messaging and possibly gain more users that their competitors such as KakaoTalk and LINE.

However, from a business’s point of view, this merge may create excessive market power for both of the companies as well as have control of the user’s data. WhatsApp’s competitors such as KakaoTalk and LINE currently have more users, however, these companies may now be intimidated by the merge with Facebook and their market share may eventually decrease.

Ultimately, this merge does seem to have potential success as Facebook’s social networking platform has 1.3 billion users worldwide, 300 million of which are also users of the Facebook Messenger app while WhatsApp, which provides a kind of low-cost replacement for text messaging, has 600 million users worldwide.