(CNN) - Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, speaking to mobile tech leaders in Barcelona, said WhatsApp, the mobile messaging app purchased by the social media giant last week, was "worth more than $19 billion."
Zuckerberg's comments at Mobile World Congress, referencing the eye-watering price paid for WhatsApp, were met with surprise.
But Zuckerberg said the company was "a great fit for us. 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 so far.
"It's on a path to connecting a billion people. There are very few services in the world that can reach that level and they're all incredibly valuable."
Zuckerberg said there were no plans to harvest data from WhatsApp messages, in answer to a question from the audience. "That's the service that people want, we would be silly to change it."
Asked if he thought concerns over privacy could be a problem for Facebook as it aims for greater global penetration, he said: "The NSA issue is a real issue, especially for American internet companies.
"Trust is just such an important thing when you're thinking about using any service where you're going to share important and personal information.
"We continue to work to be sure we can share everything that the government is asking of us."
"The government kind of blew it on this. Governments have a responsibility to protect folks and to also be transparent about what they're doing and I think they've just been way over the line in terms of sharing what they are doing.
"But they are only now starting to get to the range of where they should have been. I think this whole thing could have been avoidable and it would have been a lot better for the internet."
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