Stripe reportedly in talks to acquire PayPal
Payments company Stripe and private equity firm Advent International are discussing a potential purchase of PayPal, the Wall Street Journal reports, after an earlier offer of $60.50 per share was rejected in July.
Stripe and private equity investor Advent International are in discussions to acquire PayPal, according to a Wall Street Journal report. In July, the pair offered $60.50 per share for the payments company, valuing it at roughly $53 billion, but the offer was not enough to convince PayPal to accept a sale.
Before that offer, PayPal shares had been trading at historic lows, with the company valued at around $40 billion — a steep drop from the roughly $320 billion peak it reached at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
While the negotiations could still fall apart, the two parties are now discussing a higher per-share price, and a deal could be announced within weeks if talks continue to progress.
An equal partnership
According to an earlier Reuters report on the bid, Stripe and Advent would each take an equal stake in PayPal, becoming joint owners rather than splitting the company apart. Such a deal would make Stripe one of the largest online payments companies in the world, processing an estimated $3.7 trillion in payments annually.
PayPal appointed a new chief executive, Enrique Lores, in March, and he has since worked to turn the company around. Lores reorganized PayPal into three separate units: one focused on checkout, another on Venmo, and a third covering payments and crypto.
It remains unclear how this new structure would factor into a potential acquisition, but Reuters noted that a combined Stripe-PayPal entity could reduce Stripe's reliance on Visa and Mastercard's payment networks. It would also give Stripe the ability to fold Venmo, PayPal's checkout system, and its crypto features into its own product lineup.
