Twitter shares surged 21 percent to $22.62 on Friday after CNBC reported the company has received expressions of interest from several technology or media companies and may get a formal bid shortly.
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Twitter, Salesforce and Alphabcould not be reached immediately for comment. Twitter is working with investment banks Goldman Sachs and Allen & Co in considering possible transactions, sources familiar with the situation said.
Twitter, which is struggling to add new users amid stalled growth, now has a market value of almost $16 billion.
Update 10:30am ET: TechCrunch reports that Verizon has also expressed interest in acquiring Twitter, even as it prepares to buy Yahoo.
The CNBC report sent Twitter shares to their highest since early January.
Google, on the other hand, has experimented with social media but failed (remember Orkut, Google+?). Salesforce serves business customers with cloud-based computing services and has virtually no presence in consumer media.
The benefit of taking over from Twitter is that the user base is already present on a platform that’s unique and popular. “I simply love Twitter”, he said.
The suiters courting Twitter are said to be interested in the data the company generates from its 313 million active users. Nevertheless, it seems that Salesforce’s Chief Digital Evangelist, Vala Afshar has a possible explanation behind their company’s interest in Twitter.
Later, he noted that he has tweeted his “personal views regarding ‘Why Twitter?'” several times over the last few years. Twitter missed Wall Street’s sales expectations in both the first and second quarters of 2016, according to Thomson Reuters StarMine, and has yet to produce a net profit in 11 quarters as a public company. While seen as a valuable tool for disseminating news and providing large coverage of major social events, Twitter has lagged behind Facebook and Snapchat in terms of growth and fan loyalty.
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The company has also faced criticism for its failure to stem abuse on the platform and for missing the opportunity to play a bigger role in the red-hot messaging arena. As a matter of fact, Twitter’s shares has been plummeting remarkably from 2014.
