Case Notes (TB2W01): Strategic Growth

Rishita Sukhadiya
K2025677
1

Meta - Facebook

Companies must use the appropriate strategic approaches and tactics if they want to expand
both financially and geographically and organizationally. The organisation and the
management divisions are in charge of analysing and weighing all the potential advantages
and disadvantages of their strategic advancements, mergers, acquisitions, and partnerships.

When a business uses its resources and talents to create a distinctive product that gives
them a competitive edge over rivals, this is referred to as organic development. Facebook
has developed a number of AR and VR technologies and softwares for use in a variety of
industries, including gaming, corporate offices, colleges, and even the medical area. For
instance, Facebook has developed real-time speech-to-speech translation called LASER
(Meta, 2022), which simplifies communication with others and is seen as the future of
translation. It will be challenging for rivals like Google and Microsoft to build the same
technologies as Facebook rapidly. Organic development has five main advantages that will
help Facebook over the period of time as they develop more technologies which are
knowledge and learning about the organisations, investments are divided into branches, no
availability constraints, culture management and strategic independence.

Whatsapp is Facebook's largest and most well-known purchase. Whatsapp was purchased
by Facebook in 2014 for nearly $16 billion (Deutsch, 2022). Facebook's research and
development efforts to determine where networks are strong and accessible as well as
where networks are often utilised have benefited greatly from the purchase. Facebook was
able to pinpoint the regions throughout the world that they needed to reach in this way by
using Whatsapp's mobile user statistics. Because of their daily user base, Whatsapp was
also a good fit for Facebook. Over 450 million people used WhatsApp, and the company
reported a daily gain of 1 million subscribers everyday. It is estimated that let alone after the
acquisition Whatsapp has brought over billions of users to Facebook. (Deutsch, 2022). The
acquisition helped Facebook in geographical context adding more users to the application as
well as gaining a lot of data from Whatsapp about their global network reach. Facebook's
strategy over here was simply extension and expansion of the organisation using the
resources and capabilities of both the companies and to come together to make
communication easier physically as well as for the metaverse.

Strategic Alliance is when two companies come together to meet one common aim, here it is
making communication easier for the world for both the companies. Facebook knew the
strength and consistency Whatsapp users had and wanted the same for Facebook’s
application. Whatsapp shares information to Facebook on network connectivity, users
personal usage example photos and videos shared region by region which helps Facebook
understand the needs of the customers globally (Meta Investor Relations, 2021). Soon
Facebook will allow Whatsapp users to link their Facebook pages with Whatsapp Business
accounts which will make communication even more easier in terms of usage and outreach
to more audiences. The two companies seem to have a lot of trust hence the acquisition is
known to be one of the most successful ones in history. Mark Zukerberg also mentioned that
even after the evacuation Whatsaapp will run independently just how Instagram did to make
sure of organisational problems as well to avoid certain user data privacy.

References

● Meta Investor Relations, (2020) Facebook to acquire WhatsApp, Meta. Available

at:
https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-details/2014/Facebook-to-Acqu
ire-WhatsApp/default.aspx
● D. DePamphilis, Mergers, Acquisitions and Other Restructuring Activities, 10th
edn, Academic Press, Elsevier, 2019. For some alternative perspectives, see the
collec- tion by D.N. Angwin (ed.), M&A, Blackwell, 2007.
● Meta Information Centre, M. (2022) Using AI to translate speech for a primarily oral
language, Meta. Available at:
https://about.fb.com/news/2022/10/hokkien-ai-speech-translation/
● Deutsch, A.L. (2022) WhatsApp: The best meta purchase ever?, Investopedia.
Investopedia. Available at:
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/032515/whatsapp-best-facebook-p
urchase-ever.asp