Google SVP: We Never Made An Offer to Buy WhatsApp

Google’s Senior Vice President Sundar Pichai has denied making any acquisition offers to WhatsApp in a statement he made at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) yesterday (via The Telegraph). When Facebook announced plans for its $19 billion acquisition of the popular messaging app, Fortune reported that Google had also made an offer of $10 billion to WhatsApp. However, the Google executive is now saying that any claims of Facebook outbidding Google are “simply untrue”.

Speaking at the MWC in Barcelona, Mr Pichai praised WhatsApp’s achievements, and said that Google had talked to them in the past about working more closely together. Whatsapp was definitely an exciting product,” he said. “We never made an offer to acquire them. Press reports to the contrary are simply untrue.”

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said in an earlier statement that WhatsApp, which currently has 465m users, is worth significantly more than the $19 billion he paid for it and will help spread internet access to billions more people. “I could be wrong. It could be the one service that reaches 1bn [users] and doesn’t become valuable”, he added.

A couple of days back, WhatsApp made another big announcement at the MWC, noting that the app will add voice services in the very near future.