Mark Zuckerberg: WhatsApp Worth More Than $19 Billion

Last week Facebook announced that it will be acquiring the popular instant messaging app WhatsApp for $16 billion, experts have been saying how can a messaging app startup be worth so much more than say, Motorola Mobility, which has thousands of employees?

In a conversation made by Motorola Mobility, Mark Zuckerberg the CEO of Facebook said that WhatsApp was a ‘great fit’ for his company and that it was worth more than the $19B ($16B + $3B in vested shares) they paid for it…

Bloomberg reports:

Facebook Inc. (FB) Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said WhatsApp Inc., which his social-media company agreed to buy last week, was “worth more than $19 billion. The mobile-messaging startup was “a great fit for us,” Zuckerberg said at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona yesterday. “Already almost half-a-billion people love using WhatsApp for messaging and it’s the most engaging app we’ve ever seen exist on mobile by far.”

The acquisition, which consists of $4 billion in cash, $12 billion in Facebook shares, and $3 billion in shares that will vest over the next several years, is the largest ever by the 10-year-old Facebook. It’s also the most expensive for an Internet company since the early 2000′s.

“WhatsApp is well on its way to connecting 1 billion people, Zuckerberg said, and few services in the world attain that reach without becoming valuable. WhatsApp has more than 450 million users a month.
“I think by itself it’s worth more than $19 billion,” he said. “It’s hard to exactly make that case today because they have so low revenue. … I could be wrong—there is some chance that this is the one service that gets to a billion people and ends up not being that valuable—[but] I don’t think I am.”

So what do you think guys ? Could Mark increase the number or what ? Share your thoughts.