A few days ago, Pinterest co-founder Evan Sharp announced that he would leave the company.
(Photo: Reuters)
Dusseldorf The next mega takeover is likely to be pending among the world’s largest technology groups. The Internet payment service PayPal is planning to buy the online pinboard Pinterest, according to reports from several US media. Negotiations between representatives of both sides are very far and could be concluded in the next few weeks, according to the reports.
Paypal is said to have offered $ 70 per Pinterest share. The purchase price would amount to 45 billion dollars, the equivalent of around 39 billion euros. It would be the largest takeover of a social media group to date. Technology giant Microsoft paid a good $ 26 billion for the LinkedIn career platform five years ago.
After the reports were published, Pinterest shares rose almost 13 percent to just under $ 63. The PayPal rating, however, dropped by more than four percent. Investors apparently doubt the sense of the possible purchase for the payment service provider.
PayPal had profited greatly from the corona pandemic, in which many people used digital payment methods due to contact restrictions. Since the beginning of 2020, the PayPal share had gained more than 125 percent. Currently, PayPal is valued at more than $ 300 billion on the stock exchange.
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Driven by the success, PayPal President Dan Schulman announced that he wanted to expand the payment app significantly. In July he presented the long-term goal of a “super app” that would combine financial services with communication, shopping and other functions.
Since then, PayPal had taken a number of steps to expand its offering. In September, the Palo Alto financial group took over the Japanese purchasing service provider Paidy for $ 2.7 billion. Paidy enables customers to purchase a product and only pay later in installments – often without interest.
Schulman had announced to analysts: “In the next few months we are planning to launch a variety of products and services in the US in the areas of payment transactions, basic financial services for consumers, and trading and purchasing tools, which we will launch quarter by quarter.”
When asked for a more specific description of the super app, Schulman replied: “You don’t have to leave the platform to send messages back and forth. Obviously, the user interface is being redesigned. And we integrate topics such as discount campaigns or shopping into the app. ”This could be the calculation for a possible Pinterest purchase.
Pinterest has a completely different business model
In contrast to Paidy, however, Pinterest is far from the previous PayPal business model. On the platform, users can create pin boards on which they collect pictures on various topics. This includes, for example, furnishing ideas or the next vacation destinations. For some time now, Pinterest has also been expanding the options for targeted image searches.
The company earns money with placed advertising. The platform also wants to offer direct shopping opportunities.
In the most recently published figures for the second quarter of this year, Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann announced a year-on-year sales growth of 125 percent to 613 million euros. The number of monthly active users increased by nine percent to 454 million. However, analysts had expected more and market capitalization had plummeted by around eight billion dollars in one day.
According to quarterly figures, Pinterest achieved an average turnover of 1.32 dollars with one user. However, these revenues are very unevenly distributed. A user in the USA brings the company an average of $ 5.08, in the rest of the world it is only $ 0.36.
Pinterest is currently trying to expand its user base and is copying ideas from other networks such as the video services Tiktok or Snapchat. It was only on Wednesday that Pinterest presented new video formats in portrait format, as well as a fund to support users who create valuable content with a volume of 30 million dollars.
More: Corona profiteer Pinterest wants to attack the advertising market