Just days after selling WhatsApp for $19bn to Facebook, Jan Koum arrived at a Barcelona mobile industry conference to deliver a further shock to a telecoms industry already nervous about the strengthened competition from its low-cost messaging platform.
From next quarter, the company’s 465m users will be able to make calls to each other, opening up a new threat to the traditional revenues generated by telecoms groups that have seen their SMS cash cow slain by the rise of messaging platforms like WhatsApp.
And WhatsApp will not stop there, according to Mr Koum, talking to the Financial Times after his keynote speech at Mobile World Congress. He wants to have a voice service bigger than any of the existing mobile players, with a goal of 1bn users. The company is currently adding more than 1m customers a day, and has needed to double its servers every year to keep up with “insane” demand from emerging market economies such as Russia, India and Brazil, said Mr Koum, as more people owned smartphones.