Facebook’s acquisition of WhatsApp may open even more doors for the popular application to keep its users connected, including carrier partnerships.
According to Bloomberg, Deutsche Telekom AG, owner of T-Mobile branches worldwide, could be the first recipient of such a partnership. This partnership would not be finding its way inside German borders, however, according to Claudia Nemat, a board member overseeing the European unit of the German carrier, who’s also pushing WhatsApp alternatives like Joyn and Jibe to “appeal to different groups” of people, depending on age and how important they consider privacy.
It’s interesting to see a carrier embracing messaging this much, as text messaging revenues lost as a result of these services are pretty high. Last year alone, $32.5 billion of potential revenue from text messaging because of messaging apps was, according to estimates by Ovum. By 2018, Juniper Research estimates that 75 percent of all mobile messaging traffic will be through these various applications.
It will also be interesting to see how such an alliance would perform once voice calling capabilities are added to WhatsApp.
As we said last year, though, the messaging market is evolving and the carriers need to evolve with it.