Where will Twitter find its nest?
Shares of the tech company, led by Jack Dorsey, plunged over 5% in trading Friday to $16.88, after the Financial Times reported that its final rumored bidder, Salesforce (CRM), had decided not buy up the ailing social media company.
“In this case we’ve walked away. It wasn’t the right fit for us,” Marc Benioff, chief executive of SalesForce, told the Times.
Shares of Twitter reached a year-to-date closing high on October 5— $24.87—as rumors of a bidding war betweens several large companies mounted. But that array of bidders—including Google, Disney, and Microsoft—each said they too had no interest in Twitter earlier this week. The stock has fallen 33% since its year-to-date high, losing roughly 5.6 billion in market capitalization in a week and a half.
Some analysts though say Twitter might not have given its last chirp quite yet. Some have pointed at Japanese tech investor, SoftBank, as a potential acquirer. Others have suggested that a private-equity fund could snap up the company in a leveraged buyout—though that could lead to massive layoffs within Twitter.
Twitter is expected to report its third quarter earnings on Thursday, Oct. 27. Since the company went public in 2013, it has struggled show investors that it can attract new users, while several top executives have been replaced at the firm. Even Dorsey came on board just last year. In the second quarter, the company had its slowest growth in quarterly revenue since going public. Sales were still up 20% to $602 million, but that still fell short of analysts estimates of $606.8 million.
The real problem: Twitter’s user base grew even slower, to just 313 million from 310 million monthly active users. Rival Facebook has just over 1.7 billion active users.
Twitter’s stock has slid 76% from its all-time closing high of $69 in January 2014.