As of January 2014, WhatsApp has 430 million monthly active users worldwide

Just after mobile messaging app WhatsApp announced last month that its number of monthly active users had exceeded 400 million, the company's co-founder and CEO Jan Koum said at the DLD (Digital, Life, Design) conference in Munich, Germany on Monday that WhatsApp's total number of monthly active users worldwide has reached 430 million.

Despite the challenges from rivals such as WeChat, Line, KakaoTalk and Snapchat, WhatsApp said it would stick to its usual approach: avoid advertising; stay away from "gimmicks" such as disappearing pictures and games; and continue to require users to pay for use as its basic business model. WhatsApp, which requires users to pay, is currently free to download and costs $0.99 per year after the first year.

Koum said, "The most important thing is to focus," not disappearing pictures. Koum's speech was clearly aimed at Snapchat, an app that disappears after reading. Of WhatsApp's 430 million users, about 30 million have been added in the past few months. WhatsApp currently sends and receives 50 billion messages a day, which is equivalent to the total number of text messages sent and received.

Koum said, "No ads, no games, no gimmicks." This is the creed that Brian Acton, another co-founder of WhatsApp, adheres to and is fully supported by Koum. Koum said, "We just want to focus on the messaging business. If people want to play games, there are many other websites; in addition, there are many great companies that have built services around advertising. The application market is a 'free market', so the attractive thing is that people can get those features from it."

Koum did not disclose whether WhatsApp has achieved profitability or other financial data. He simply said, "We are already making money, but the most important thing at the moment is not making money. One day, WhatsApp will make this a priority, but the main task at the moment is still to build the WhatsApp service."

Earlier, it was reported that Snapchat rejected acquisition offers of up to $4 billion from Facebook and Google. Regarding the rumors of possible acquisition, Koum said that WhatsApp is still optimistic about independent growth. He told David Rowan, a reporter from Wired, "When we started the company, we wanted to build a long-term stable company. It is not difficult to sell a company, but look at the leading companies in the market today, such as Facebook, Google, Yahoo and Twitter, they have never been sold. They have always remained independent and provided users with a series of great products."

Koum admitted in the interview that the above companies all developed products around advertising. Although WhatsApp did not do so, the main idea is the same, that is, "For us, we must build a company that can continue to operate."

Although WhatsApp currently has a total of 430 million users, it remains very low-key and tries to maintain the mentality of an innovative company. The company recently recruited 50 employees, 25 of whom are technical staff and another 20 are good at multilingual customer support. Koum said, "We are still small in scale. We have always believed that advertising should be avoided. Because users pay us, we have established a direct relationship with them."

Koum also said in the interview that he prefers Android to iOS. He said, "Android is more open. We can launch more new features faster around the Android platform, not to mention that WhatsApp has more Android users."