PayPal Is in Talks to Buy Pinterest

Pinterest is an online-sharing platform on which prospects share images and hyperlinks to recipes and home-decor ideas. It makes money from adverts that appear on the platform, nonetheless e-commerce is in its sights, too. In April, Pinterest expanded a partnership it struck in 2020 with e-commerce software program program provider

Shopify Inc.

SHOP 0.12%

to realize prospects in 27 additional worldwide areas, up from merely the U.S. and Canada beforehand.

Best acknowledged for its checkout button enabling prospects to easily pay for purchases on retailers’ websites, PayPal recently set a way of being a go-to service for not merely funds and financial suppliers, however as well as e-commerce additional broadly. Purchasing for Pinterest could carry prospects to PayPal earlier of their procuring experience and help them uncover new objects to buy, leading to additional funds amount.

“Now we have now an infinite freeway map spherical procuring software program models,” PayPal Chief Authorities Officer

Dan Schulman

acknowledged at an investor conference last month. “I’m pretty excited by the early outcomes of that and what we’ll do after we develop to be type of a trip spot.”

PayPal rode a wave of digital-payment adoption over the course of the coronavirus pandemic to publish doc numbers of consumers and transaction volumes. That has propelled the stock, which could most likely be used to help pay for any Pinterest deal, and given the company a market price of some $300 billion.

Nevertheless PayPal patrons reacted coolly to the potential deal, information of which was first reported by Bloomberg, sending the shares down larger than 6% at one degree Wednesday. Pinterest shares rose virtually 14%.

Beneath Mr. Schulman, who was employed to run the company in 2014 when it was nonetheless part of

eBay Inc.,

PayPal has appeared to deal-making to division out into new geographies and corporations. Last month, PayPal agreed to amass Japanese buy-now-pay-later agency Paidy Inc. for about $2.7 billion.

Nevertheless Pinterest may be PayPal’s biggest-ever acquisition by far. So far, a very powerful deal it ever completed was looking for Honey Science Corp. in 2019 for about $4 billion. Not that it doesn’t have the wherewithal: PayPal had larger than $19 billion in cash, equivalents, and investments as of June.

Pinterest went public in 2019 and its shares have been up and down over the earlier yr as its outcomes have been a mixed bag. Its shopper progress had soared inside the early days of the pandemic as Net utilization surged additional broadly. The company reported in July, nonetheless, that its monthly average users dropped 5% from a yr earlier, which initially despatched its shares down 14% in after-hours shopping for and promoting.

Last week, Pinterest acknowledged its co-founder,

Evan Sharp,

is transitioning from his full-time perform as chief design and inventive officer to an advisory place and might keep on its board of directors. The company moreover acknowledged Mr. Sharp has joined a inventive company led by former Apple Inc. design chief

Jony Ive.

Pinterest’s totally different co-founder,

Ben Silbermann,

is its chief authorities officer.

A deal for Pinterest may be one in all many biggest mergers of the yr, at a time when deal train is buzzing. Surging stock prices and straightforward accessibility to cash as a result of the financial system recovers from Covid-19 have emboldened companies to strike larger than $2 trillion of affords inside the U.S. so far this yr, larger than double last yr’s tempo, in response to Dealogic.

Financial experience has been a hotbed, as evidenced by Sq. Inc.’s settlement this summer season to amass Australia’s

Afterpay Ltd.

for spherical $29 billion.

—Peter Rudegeair and Sarah E. Needleman contributed to this textual content.

Write to Dana Cimilluca at dana.cimilluca@wsj.com and Cara Lombardo at cara.lombardo@wsj.com