Google: we never bid on WhatsApp

Google denies ever making an offer for WhatsApp through the vice president. Previous rumors that Facebook would have outbid for a takeover would not be true. The company did find WhatsApp an ‘exciting product’.

Google and WhatsApp did have talks about close cooperation, Google vice president Sundar Pichai said at the Mobile World Congress telecom fair, according to The Telegraph. “WhatsApp was certainly an exciting product. We never made an offer to buy them. Press reports about this are simply not true.”

Last week, two rumors appeared about the acquisition plans that Google would have had. According to CNN, Google wanted to buy WhatsApp for an amount of up to 7.3 billion euros, where Facebook eventually took off with the chat app for 11.6 billion euros. The Information followed up with the report that Google would even have been willing to outbid Facebook. However, Google would have been mainly interested in WhatsApp to keep the company out of Facebook’s hands; so WhatsApp decided to go into business with Facebook after all.

During his keynote at the MWC fair, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, said that he believes WhatsApp is worth much more than $ 19 billion. He responded to criticism that the acquisition price would be very high.