Entareyehirungu
JF-Expert Member
- Oct 27, 2006
- 488
- 471
Hii ndiyo habari kubwa leo kwenye ulimwengu wa teknolojia na mitandao ya Kijamii. Microsoft wametangaza kuununua mtandao maarufu wa Wanataaluma mbalimbali uitwao LinkedIn kwa dola bilioni 26 sawa na dola 196 kwa kila hisa la LinkedIn. Biashara hii tayari imeridhiwa na kuizinishwa na Bodi za makampuni yote mawili.
Kwenye hii kasi ya kuuza mitandao nasi Tanzania tumo japo ukubwa na thamani ya mitandao yetu si kubwa kivile. Mfano hivi karibuni mtandao wa zoomtanzania.com umenunuliwa na Ringier Africa Sijuhi kama TRA walikusanya chao hapa?! Microsoft ni kama vile wanahamishia nguvu kwenye kununua ufalme wa mitandao ya Jamii katika mabara mbalimbali. Zimekuwepo tetesi za mazungumzo ya Microsoft kutaka kununua mitandao maarufu ya kijamii Afrika ukiwemo JamiiForums.com Naisubiri kwa hamu hiyo acquisition.
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The $196/share offer is a big hike on its closing price from Friday, $131.08. (And in premarket trading, unsurprisingly, LinkedIn’s stock has nearly crept up 64% to reach the share price MSFT is paying. Microsoft’s price is down 4% to $49.66 in pre-market trading.)
LinkedIn is keeping its branding and product, and it will become a part of Microsoft’s productivity and business processes segment. LinkedIn’s CEO Jeff Weiner will report to Satya Nadella.
The acquisition is a big one for both sides.
For Microsoft, it’s bringing a key, missing piece into the company’s strategy to build out more services for enterprises. Today, the company is focused squarely on software (and some hardware by way of its very downsized phones business).
LinkedIn will give Microsoft a far bigger reach in terms of social networking services and professional content — developing the early signs of enterprise social networking that it kicked off with its acquisition of Yammer for $1.2 billion in 2012. LinkedIn’s wider social network, pegged as it is to groups of employees and employers, could also give Microsoft a potential sales channel to sell more of its products, and will serve as a complement to those that it already offers for collaboration and communication.
There are other elements of LinkedIn’s business that are interesting to consider in light of this acquisition. LinkedIn acquired Lynda.com, for example, to spearhead a move into offering online learning tools to users — expanding on their bigger hope of being the go-to place for overall professional development. Now, with Microsoft, you can see how Lynda might be employed to help sell Microsoft software products, and provide assistance in learning to use them.
“The LinkedIn team has grown a fantastic business centered on connecting the world’s professionals,” Nadella said in a statement. “Together we can accelerate the growth ofLinkedIn, as well as Microsoft Office 365 and Dynamics as we seek to empower every person and organization on the planet.”
(And just as a side-note, this puts some of Microsoft’s recent cost-cutting through layoffs and sales into some perspective as well.)
For LinkedIn, it puts to rest questions of how the company would ever compete with companies that are building more software on top of their social graphs that would put it into closer competition against LinkedIn. For a while, it looked like this was the direction that LinkedIn hoped to develop, but more recent problems with user and revenue growth, and a subsequent dropping share price, has put the company on the defensive.
“Just as we have changed the way the world connects to opportunity, this relationship withMicrosoft, and the combination of their cloud and LinkedIn‘s network, now gives us a chance to also change the way the world works,” Weiner added in the statement. “For the last 13 years, we’ve been uniquely positioned to connect professionals to make them more productive and successful, and I’m looking forward to leading our team through the next chapter of our story.”
But this is not at all a story about a failing company getting scooped up on the way down for parts. LinkedIn, even with a share price that is below its 12-month high point of $258/share, is one of the better performing of tech companies in the public markets.
Microsoft has never been a massively successful company when it comes to social networking — although it smartly invested in Facebook before it went public, and as we have reported before it was apparently interested at one point in trying to make a bid to buy Slack for $8 billion. LinkedIn’s social network will give it a significant foothold in this area.
LinkedIn is active in over 200 countries and has 105 million monthly active users, with 433 million registered overall. The company has some 60% of all traffic on mobile, and — thanks to some strong SEO — a crazy 45 billion quarterly page views. It’s also one of the biggest repositories of job listings, with some 7 million active listings currently. While some parts of LinkedIn’s business has stagnated, specifically with MAU growth (which is up only 9% on last year) latter is a growing business — up 101% on a year ago.
LinkedIn’s core business is based today around recruitment ads and, to a lesser extend, premium subscriptions for users. The recruitment business (termed “Talent Solutions”) accounted for $2 billion of the company’s $3 billion in revenues in 2015.
And as you can see from the photo above, Reid Hoffman, one of the co-founders and current chairman, is behind the deal.
“Today is a re-founding moment for LinkedIn. I see incredible opportunity for our members and customers and look forward to supporting this new and combined business,” said Hoffman in a statement. “I fully support this transaction and the Board’s decision to pursue it, and will vote my shares in accordance with their recommendation on it.”
Source: myjoyonline.com