Los Angeles — World’s most popular social media network Facebook, with more than 500 million members, on Monday made yet another dive into mobile platform seeking to deepen its penetration in the emerging 5 billion-plus global mobile phone market with the acquisition of the UK/Israeli company “Snaptu,” a developer of apps for feature phones, for a sum considered to be up to $70 million.
Facebook’s purchase of Snaptu, an Israeli startup that empowers people to tap-on smartphone-like applications on simpler “feature” phones that connects through the leading online social media network and other popular Internet destinations around the globe, with an eye toward extending its reach to the hundreds of millions of mobile phones that do not posses the computer-like Internet capabilities of smartphones.
“As part of our endeavor to offer people around the globe an opportunity to connect and contribute on mobile devices, we are thrilled to confirm that we recently endorsed an agreement to acquire Snaptu,” Facebook said in a statement.
Then Snaptu itself posted an announcement of the deal on its own blog.
According to Facebook, “Snaptu’s team and technology will allow us to deliver an even better mobile experience on feature phones more quickly.”
The acquisition, for an undisclosed terms, is the fruit of close collaboration between the two companies over the past six months to bring Facebook capabilities to feature phones.
“Feature phones” offers a vast untapped market sphere to companies such as Facebook and Twitter. Because such phones typically lack internet capabilities, they require apps written that are carefully customized to their operating software, and low requirements for data–which is usually acquired via text messaging.
However, ‘feature phones’ are a key sector, because they cover up almost 80% of mobile phones–or about 4.2 billion of the 5.3 billion mobile phones, 77% of the world population. Besides, that is operates across 2,500 devices and gives feature phone users access to services that had, up to then, only been available to smartphone users such as: synchronizing contacts, viewing photo and friend updates, and navigating everything through a social media Facebook’s home screen.
Facebook already boasts more than 200 million mobile users across smartphones and feature handsets; and it has been gradually bundling more mobile features to the service such as check-ins and local deals.
This acquisition is Facebook’s first outside of the U.S. and enriches the work the social media giant has already done to make its services accessible to more than just smartphone users in developed markets. It is Facebook’s third acquisition this year, after it bought Rel8tion, a mobile advertising company, and Beluga, a group messaging company, in January and March respectively.
Snaptu, which was established in 2007 with the stated goal of delivering on “feature phones” innovative services people access routinely on smartphones. Moreover, to breed popularity around its Facebook app, Snaptu’s partnerships with carriers like Telcel Mexico, Vodafone Romania, and Reliance India allowed the company to offer free access to its Facebook app for the first 90 days of its existence–that is free as in no data access charges would apply for anyone’s using the app.
Nevertheless, that does present a catch-22, for users that are not on one of Snaptu’s supported carriers would not be able to access the Facebook app at all.
“The deal is expected to be finalized within a few weeks. We will have more updates on Snaptu soon, and we will be working hard to offer a richer and more advanced Facebook app on virtually every mobile phone,” writes Snaptu on its blog post. “During this transition period, we expect Snaptu will continue to operate as it does today.”
The acquisition was first unfurled by two Israeli business papers, Calcalist and The Marker (Snaptu has offices in Tel Aviv, London and California).