Japan’s e-commerce giant Rakuten surprised many when it stumped up $900 million to buy mobile messaging and calling service Viber in February. The deal was announced just five days before Facebook’s landmark $19 billion acquisition of fellow chat app WhatsApp — while WhatsApp is the industry leader by some margin with over half a billion active users each month, Viber is performing better than might have been_expected. According to Rakuten’s latest earnings report — which was released today and first spotted by Tech In Asia — the business now has 400 million registered users. That’s up from 280 million registered...
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