The tech-giant, Microsoft has been ruling over the market for years now. Microsoft has taken the saying, “When you can’t beat them, join them” and has worked it to its own advantage by making their competitors join them even without trying to beat them, simply because it’s not that easy to beat Microsoft.
Everyone is aware of the feisty brand war between Microsoft and Apple back in the 90s. This corporate feud, whose love and hate relationship helped both the companies reach new heights of success also taught them how to take the lead in the future and Microsoft is indeed playing at the edge. Learning the art of acquisitions over competitions is an adept task for big players like Microsoft.
Building on an empire, Microsoft recently approached the image media sharing company and social media platform Pinterest for acquisition. Pinterest is a space for over 320 million active users to share and discover information in the form of images, videos, and gifs and save them in the form of pinboards. The tech giant offered 51 billion dollars for this acquisition which seems like a fair deal given that Pinterest made unicorn back in 2015 with a valuation of 11 billion dollars.
Following an inspiring start-up story, Pinterest was founded in 2010 by Ben Silberman, who went from designing iPhone apps with his friend to working at sales in Google and then finally building up the most famous site on the internet merely at the age of 27. The success story of Pinterest does not stop at this. It is estimated that Pinterest generates 400% more revenue per click than Twitter and 27% more than Facebook, making it beat the world’s most beloved social media platforms and the perfect set of bait for tech giants like Microsoft. Interestingly, Pinterest hosts 79% of women in its audience of active users, breaking the gender bias and once again putting it on the top list of platforms for targeted success. More than 25% of the Fortunate global companies have a Pinterest account, making it the golden egg of the basket.
When Microsoft saw the opportunity to bag Pinterest, undoubtedly the experienced player jumped at it. Owing to the news of Microsoft’s acquisition proposal, the wealth of Ben Silbermann topped 5 billion dollars.
Microsoft has been set on expanding its operations in all the fields in every direction. Therefore, this odd-looking proposition maybe not come out so odd after all considering that to achieve the expansion milestone, Microsoft has not left any stone unturned. In 2014, Microsoft bought Minecraft for 2 billion dollars, LinkedIn in 2016 for 26 billion dollars, and Skype in 2011 for 8.5 billion dollars and the list goes on.
Microsoft is going strong on its quest to expand its arms and is growing bigger day by day. It was made obvious when Microsoft expressed its interest in buying video-sharing giant TikTok just the previous year. The question is whether this interest of Microsoft craftier than it looks?
Pinterest’s market value has increased over 600% in the past year due to the pandemic and is determined to grow further. A source said that the talks for acquisition are not active yet but if finalized, it could be one of the largest acquisition deals for Microsoft up till now. On the other hand, Pinterest has expressed the desire to remain an independent company and with its soaring stock prices, it is a bit dense to seal the deal.
Microsoft’s share prices have risen by 80% due to the pandemic and although Pinterest is only about 3% of Microsoft’s 1.83 trillion-dollar market value, this deal seems quite lucrative for Microsoft.
BY:
Vidhi & Bhargab
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