Why Facebook May Pay $1B for Israeli Waze
Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
Facebook is currently in advanced negotiations to buy the Israeli navigation company Waze. The total purchase price is said to be roughly $1 billion, significantly higher than the $200 million to $300 million Facebook is believed to have offered Waze only six months ago.
Half would be paid in cash, the other half in shares of Facebook.
The main sticking point at this stage of the negotiations is Waze management’s demand that the company remain in Israel. Facebook has reportedly agreed, however, to allow Waze to continue operating as an independent company under its own brand name; development operations would remain in Israel, while the business end of the company would be absorbed by Facebook.
In the past, when Facebook purchased Israeli companies Snaptu and Face.com, Facebook closed the companies’ local operations and moved their core development teams to Silicon Valley. Facebook has yet to open a development center in Israel.
For more, go to Haaretz
It’s our birthday and we’re still celebrating!
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news.
This week we celebrate 129 years of the Forward. We’re proud of our origins as a Yiddish print publication serving Jewish immigrants. And we’re just as proud of what we’ve become today: A trusted source of Jewish news and opinion, available digitally to anyone in the world without paywalls or subscriptions.
We’ve helped five generations of American Jews make sense of the news and the world around them — and we aren’t slowing down any time soon.
As a nonprofit newsroom, reader donations make it possible for us to do this work. Support independent, agenda-free Jewish journalism and our board will match your gift in honor of our birthday!
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
