Corporate China | Is Whatsapp going to open doors for Facebook in China?

I haven't written about Facebook (Nasdaq: FB) in a while, mostly because the company hasn't made any concrete moves into China lately despite previous assertions that it would like to enter the market. But the company's newly announced plan to purchase the popular WhatsApp mobile messaging service for up to $19 billion looks like a good opportunity to revisit the topic, and what this deal might mean for Facebook in China.

The deal is the world's largest tech acquisition since Time Warner's (NYSE: TWX) $124 billion merger with AOL in 2001 at the height of the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s. The deal will give Facebook access to 450 million members of WhatsApp, which is popular in both North America and Europe.

Now that we've looked at the bigger deal, let's zero in on the implications for China. As a user of both WhatsApp and WeChat, I can personally testify that the former is a relative non-player in China, while the latter has become an instant messaging giant in its home market over the last 2 years. I use WhatsApp to communicate with many of my friends outside China, and use WeChat to stay in touch with nearly all of my China-based friends.

In terms of functionality, I do think that WeChat is a bit better than WhatsApp. One of WeChat's most popular features is a Facebook-like function that lets people share photos and links with their friends, and WeChat also has several GPS-linked features that WhatsApp lacks. In my view, WhatsApp's biggest potential attraction for Chinese users is the fact that it's not based in China, and therefore is less likely to raise suspicions that it monitors its users for politically sensitive content.