One of Japan’s biggest Internet companies, Rakuten has acquired popular messaging app Viber for $900 Million. Viber Media will add 300 million more users to Rakuten’s existing 200 million users. This is another big acquisition of Rakuten after acquisitions of Kobo, Wuaki.tv, and Viki.
Viber
As Rakuten is aiming to be world’s number 1 internet services company, this deal will help it to grow in new markets along with its e-commerce platforms. It owns e-commerce platform Rakuten Ichiba which is the largest e-commerce site in Japan.
Rakuten Chairman and CEO, Hiroshi Mikitani commented, “I am tremendously excited to welcome Viber to the Rakuten family. Viber delivers the most consistently high quality and convenient messaging and VoIP experience available. Additionally, Viber has introduced a great sticker market and has tremendous potential as a gaming platform. Simply put, Viber understands how people actually want to engage and have built the only service that truly delivers on all fronts. This makes Viber the ideal total consumer engagement platform for Rakuten as we seek to bring our deep understanding of the consumer to vast new audiences through our dynamic ecosystem of Internet Services.”
Viber is a multi-platform messaging app offering video and voice chat. It has more than 300 million registered users and recorded growth over 120% in 2013.
