Investors have long viewed WhatsApp as Meta Platforms ‘ sleeping giant. Analysts at Wolfe Research believe the popular messaging app is starting to be awoken from its slumber. The news In a note to clients Sunday, Wolfe analysts said they expect WhatsApp’s messaging service for businesses to emerge as a “more meaningful” growth catalyst in the coming years, alongside its nearly two-year-old microblogging app Threads. Currently, the firm estimates business messaging generates between $1.5 billion to $2 billion in annual revenue for Meta, with strong growth in recent quarters. Wolfe analysts see the overall total addressable market for these types of services growing to $40 billion by 2030 — up from an estimated $26 billion in 2024. Crucially, as the market gets bigger, analysts believe Meta is well-positioned to capture a larger share than the roughly mid-single-digit percentage it has today. The firm predicts Meta’s market share will reach 14.4% in 2029 and 16.9% in 2030. Based on Wolfe’s market size estimates, that implies Meta will generate business messaging revenue of about $5.8 billion in 2029 and $7.3 billion in 2030. While that represents growth from its current size, it would still be small compared to Meta’s bread-and-butter advertising business across its social media apps. In 2025 alone, Meta’s “Family of Apps” is expected to generate $185.5 billion in ad revenue, according to FactSet. Wolfe also argued Meta’s plan to roll out AI agents for small businesses to handle simple customer inquiries is an “under-appreciated” opportunity. Analysts believe Meta has a strong advantage because many businesses already use WhatsApp, which gives the company a built-in customer base that it can monetize. Meta is a top pick at Wolfe, which has a buy-equivalent outperform rating on Meta shares and a price target of $730 on the stock. META 1Y mountain Meta’s stock performance over the past 12 months. Big picture Meta has in recent years ramped up its efforts to monetize WhatsApp, which it acquired for $19 billion in 2014. The messaging app has more than 100 million monthly active users in the U.S., Meta has said, but its popularity across the world is significant. CNBC reported in 2023 that WhatsApp at the time had more than 2 billion users globally. While WhatsApp for consumers does not have ads, Meta first started charging businesses for messages on the platform in 2018 . Businesses can buy ads on Instagram and Facebook that direct users to chats on WhatsApp. In 2022, the company expanded access to a cloud-based version of its WhatsApp Business Platform. That announcement came during Meta’s first-ever business messaging conference , a reflection of its strategic priorities. As Meta leans into the trend of AI agents – generally defined as digital assistants that can complete tasks without human supervision – it is looking at its business customers as key beneficiaries of the technology. “Not every business, especially small businesses, can hire these large AI teams, and so now we’re building business AIs for these small businesses so that even they can benefit from all of this innovation that’s happening,” Clara Shih, head of business AI at Meta, told CNBC’s Julia Boorstin in an interview earlier this month. Bottom line Business messaging on WhatsApp has promising potential, even if the overall size of the opportunity is unlikely to ever rival the core Instagram and Facebook advertising revenue stream. It’s important to also consider WhatsApp in the context of Threads, which launched in July 2023 as a rival to X, formerly Twitter. Threads is still in its early monetization stage, with Meta starting testing ads on Threads in January with a few companies in the U.S. and Japan. “Between WhatsApp and Threads, Meta Platforms has two untapped verticals that if successfully monetized can provide an incremental boost to revenues,” said Jeff Marks, the Investing Club’s director of portfolio analysis. Threads currently has 320 million monthly active users and has been adding more than one million sign- ups per day, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on Meta’s fourth-quarter earnings call on Jan. 29. He said he believes Threads will “continue on its trajectory to become the leading discussion platform and eventually reach over 1 billion people over the next few years.” Jim Cramer said at the Club’s Monthly Meeting last week that Meta was his favorite of the megacap tech stocks. While a recession could hurt advertising spending in general, Jim said he believes Meta would be able to hold up relatively OK, given the popularity of its platforms. In that scenario, marketers would probably consolidate their spending on the most popular sites, and Meta’s would make the cut, he said. (Jim Cramer’s Charitable Trust is long META. See here for a full list of the stocks.) As a subscriber to the CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer, you will receive a trade alert before Jim makes a trade. Jim waits 45 minutes after sending a trade alert before buying or selling a stock in his charitable trust’s portfolio. If Jim has talked about a stock on CNBC TV, he waits 72 hours after issuing the trade alert before executing the trade. THE ABOVE INVESTING CLUB INFORMATION IS SUBJECT TO OUR TERMS AND CONDITIONS AND PRIVACY POLICY , TOGETHER WITH OUR DISCLAIMER . 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