Meta Inc. (META), which owns Facebook, the biggest social networking site in the world, was started in 2004 by CEO Mark Zuckerberg and a few of his Harvard roommates. The first name of the company was FaceMash. Later, it became “The Facebook,” then dropped “The” and became “Facebook.” In October 2021, the name was changed again, this time to Meta.
1 Zuckerberg and his co-founders started the service first for their classmates at Harvard. They quickly made it available at other universities and then to everyone. Since then, the company has grown into a worldwide powerhouse with 2.8 billion users and a market capitalization of $926.8 billion. The company’s net income for FY 2020 was $29.1 billion, and it made $84.1 billion in sales, almost all of which came from ads.
2 Meta was started 16 years ago as a social networking site, but it has grown into much more than that. It also has messenger services, apps for sharing photos and videos, augmented reality, and a lot of other apps and services.
3 The key to growing these businesses and Meta’s income as a whole has been to buy them. Meta’s plan has been to buy up possible competitors before they grow too big. In doing this, the company has sometimes paid very high prices for deals. The company has also caught the attention of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) because of possible anticompetitive practices. The FTC recently asked Meta and other big tech companies for information about unreported purchases.
4 We’ll look at Meta’s 5 biggest purchases in more depth below. The company doesn’t say how much profit or revenue each acquisition is bringing in at the moment.
Instagram is a business that lets people share photos and videos.
Cost of acquisition: $1.0 billion
Acquisition Date: April 9, 2012
Instagram is a social networking site where people can share photos and videos. It came out in 2010. Users can upload, edit, and tag photos and videos using the Instagram app. The company stayed on its own until 2012, when Meta bought it for $1.0 billion. When Meta bought Instagram, the company was getting a lot of attention from investors and venture capital firms.
6 According to some estimates, Instagram makes more money from advertising than its parent company.
Meta chose to build and grow the Instagram app separately from Meta’s main Facebook platform when it bought Instagram. Instagram is still a separate platform to this day.
5 Meta was willing to pay a lot for Instagram, even though it wasn’t making any money at the time. This shows that Meta is willing to pay more for young companies.
Mobile messaging service is what WhatsApp does for a living.
Acquisition Cost: $19.0 billion
Acquisition The 19th of February, 2014
7 WhatsApp is a messaging and calling service that people all over the world can use. The platform came out in 2009 as a low-cost alternative to regular text messaging services. WhatsApp has been around for a long time, and for most of that time, users have been able to send messages and call other users from anywhere in the world for free. Users can also use the platform to send photos, videos, and documents. Meta bought WhatsApp when it had more than 400 million monthly active users, making it a fast-growing potential competitor to the Facebook network platform.
When Meta bought WhatsApp, it was a separate business that was recently worth $1.5 billion.
Even though no one knows for sure how much money WhatsApp makes, some people think that by 2020, WhatsApp could make as much as $5 billion.
Oculus VR
It is a type of business that is a virtual reality technology company.
Cost of acquisition: $2.0 billion acquisition Date: March 25, 2014
Just a few weeks after announcing that it had bought WhatsApp, Meta bought Oculus VR, a company that makes hardware and software for virtual reality. This company was started in 2012, and the Oculus Rift, a virtual reality headset for video games, is its most famous product. Since Facebook bought Oculus VR in 2014, the company has bought other companies on its own. One of the most important was the purchase of Surreal Vision in 2015. Surreal Vision is a company that specializes in 3D scene mapping reconstruction.
When Meta bought Oculus VR, the company had only made a test version of what would become its popular headset product. Meta’s purchase of Oculus VR put it right into the market for virtual reality at a time when developers were becoming more interested in it.
Onavo
Acquisition of mobile web analytics services Cost: $100–200 million (estimated)
The date of purchase is October 2013.
The Israeli company Onavo started in 2010, and it does web analytics on other mobile apps to find out how customers use them. Meta bought Onavo in October 2013 for an amount that was not made public but was thought by some analysts to be between $100 million and $200 million.
At the time that it was bought, Onavo was a separate company. Even though Onavo is not one of Meta’s biggest purchases, its technology may have helped Meta decide early on which other companies and apps to buy. Onavo has sometimes been called spyware, which caused Meta to remove it from both the iOS and Android app stores when it got bad reviews.
Beluga
Message Service: Type of Business
Cost of acquisition: unknown
Acquisition Date: March 2, 2011
A service for messaging apps Meta bought Beluga a year after it was started in 2010. Meta bought Beluga for an amount that hasn’t been made public while the company was still trying to raise money. When Facebook bought Beluga, it got the technology that became the highly successful Messenger platform for the social media company. In the process, Meta added more services and got rid of a possible competitor.
Diversity and Inclusion on Facebook: Transparency
As part of our work to make people more aware of how important diversity is in companies, we’ve pointed out how open Meta is about its commitment to diversity, inclusion, and social responsibility. The chart below shows how Meta shows how diverse its management and employees are. This shows if Meta shares information about the diversity of its board of directors, C-suite, general management, and employees overall across a number of markers. We’ve said that being honest is important.
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