Meta Platforms-owned WhatsApp announced an investment in a Singapore company. Here’s a look at the investment and what it does.
What Happened: WhatsApp, which is owned by Meta Platforms Inc (NASDAQ:META), is an investor in Take App.
Take App targets restaurants, bakeries, grocery businesses, beauty salons and other businesses with a suite of services such as website building for online orders, payment options and order managing and tracking. Take App offers direct connections to WhatsApp for businesses.
Take App was founded by Youmin Kim, a former Facebook engineering manager who left Facebook to work on a new product aimed at small business owners in Southeast Asia.
“Our unique selling point is that we let merchants keep direct WhatsApp conversations with customers,” Kim told TechCrunch. “Merchants love the idea that they receive notifications and order details directly in WhatsApp — no other app or login required.”
Take App also offers a database of customers and allows sending newsletters and special offers to previous customers.
Core Take App features are offered for free. Premium features available for a fee include advanced analytics, unlimited image uploads and custom domain names.
Take App has more than 1,000 business customers in 35 different countries with Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia as the company’s main markets.
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Why It’s Important: WhatsApp started as a messaging app for friends and has become an important tool for businesses in international markets. The integration of WhatsApp with Take App could help this become a key feature for Meta Platforms' international growth moving forward.
“In Southeast Asia, WhatsApp is the most common way to talk to business, but it incurs heavy operation costs as employees have to respond to a number of conversations,” Kim said. “There are ‘western’ CRM solutions that make this more efficient, but they are too expensive or difficult for our merchants.”
The comments from Kim suggest Take App could have room to expand targeting businesses as a low-cost solution in many territories that can’t afford existing products.
Meta ended the second quarter with 1.97 billion daily active users across its platforms including Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. Monthly active users for the company were 2.93 billion in the second quarter.
Meta has seen a decline in advertising-related revenue, which could make diversification to other product offerings and future international growth a key offsetting measure.
META Price Action: Meta Platforms shares closed at $180.89 on Monday versus a 52-week range of $154.32 to $384.33. After-hours shares are trading down 0.18% at $180.57.
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