Twitter Shares Surge on Takeover Report--2nd Update

By Austen Hufford

Twitter Inc. shares surged in trading Friday after CNBC reported that the company was examining the possibility of a sale.

CNBC's David Faber said no sale was imminent but that Twitter may receive a formal bid shortly and is engaged with suitors. Salesforce.com Inc. and Google parent Alphabet Inc. are believed to be among the suitors, CNBC said.

A representative from Twitter wasn't immediately available for comment.

Twitter shares jumped 14% to $21.28 in morning trading in New York. Before Friday, the stock had fallen 30% over the past year.

In the years since its November 2013 initial public offering, which was priced at $26, Twitter has struggled with slow user expansion and shrinking revenue growth. In its June quarter, Twitter reported 20% revenue growth, its smallest gain to-date and eighth-straight period of declining growth.

Since Chief Executive Jack Dorsey retook the helm in 2015, Twitter has sought to reinvigorate its ads business around video and revive user growth by making the short-messaging service he invented easier to use.

Last October, the company released its Moments feature, which curates tweets, photos and videos shared on the service around sporting events, entertainment and breaking news, to help newcomers get pulled into the service.

Last week, Twitter introduced its first live-stream of a National Football League game, with an average audience of 243,000 viewers a minute watching the New York Jets beat the Buffalo Bills. Still, that paled in comparison with the average of 15.4 million people who watched the game on CBS and the NFL Network.

The football game was one of the first major events for Twitter's live-streaming strategy, the cornerstone of its plan to become the premier destination for live events. Twitter is trying to appeal to advertisers by capitalizing on its strength as a real-time service and the growing trend of cord-cutting viewers. Twitter plans to also stream the presidential and vice presidential debates.

Twitter's struggles, alongside a deal-friendly climate in Silicon Valley, has raised questions around Twitter's future as an independent public company.

--George Stahl contributed to this article.

Write to Austen Hufford at austen.hufford@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

September 23, 2016 09:50 ET (13:50 GMT)

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