Almost becoming the largest acquisition in Microsoft's history? Rumor has it that it tried to acquire Pinterest, which has a market value of $54 billion
Recently, the British "Financial Times" reported that Microsoft had proposed to acquire the image social media Pinterest in recent months. But people familiar with the matter said that negotiations between the two sides have stopped.
Pinterest said it prefers to remain an independent company, and Microsoft prefers to acquire Pinterest directly so that the latter's community can be integrated with Microsoft's cloud. As of the 17th, Pinterest has a market value of approximately US$54 billion, and its stock price has risen 36% in the past three months.
During the Wuhan pneumonia period, due to the increase of users' home time, the activity and use time of the social media platform reached a record high, which directly benefited Pinterest. In the fourth quarter of 2020, Pinterest's monthly active users increased by 37%, reaching 459 million. In 2020, it will add 100 million users, and its quarterly revenue will increase by 76% compared to the same period.
The transaction was expected to become the largest acquisition in Microsoft's history, far exceeding the current Microsoft largest: the $26 billion acquisition of LinkedIn. If you look closely, you will find that Microsoft has been very enthusiastic about acquiring "Community" over the years.
In June 2016, Microsoft acquired LinkedIn for US$26.2 billion. LinkedIn can be said to be the workplace community.
In June 2018, Microsoft acquired GitHub for $7.5 billion. GitHub is the world's largest open-source code-sharing community.
Recently, Microsoft intends to acquire Pinterest, which has a market value of 54 billion U.S. dollars, which is a community that gathers a large number of pictures.
Horizontally, the prototype of Microsoft's "user strategy" three axes was exposed with this transaction and gradually surfaced, namely engineers + business users + the general public.
At the vertical level, the three acquisitions are inseparable from Microsoft's "cloud strategy": GitHub is the underlying source code platform, LinkedIn is the middle-level workplace platform, and Pinterest is the terminal-level application platform.
Three horizontal and three verticals, whether the business cycle ecology of Microsoft's user strategy and cloud strategy can be formed, may only be answered after the third community acquisition case is settled.