A Saudi prince billionaire will not sell any of his shares in Twitter when it goes public, he has announced.
Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, who owns investment firm Kingdom Holding 4280.SE, invested $300m (£189m) in the social networking site in late 2011.
He told Reuters on Sunday that he expects Twitter to IPO by early 2014, but confirmed his own company would not sell any part of its stake in the site.
"Twitter is a very strategic investment for us. We believe that it is just beginning to touch the surface," he said in the interview.
Twitter filed for an IPO of its shares with US regulators earlier this month, and is claimed to have more than 200m users.
Analysts expect the company to be valued at $10bn, but Alwaleed believes it could be worth upwards of $15bn.
He did not tell Reuters whether he believed Twitter would choose the New York Stock Exchange ahead of Nasdaq after Facebook’s disappointing IPO with the latter.
But he said it should learn lessons from Facebook’s experience – "not to brag too much, don’t be greedy".
