(Bloomberg) -- DocuSign Inc., whose software handles electronic signatures, rallied the most in a year after the Wall Street Journal reported that the company was considering a sale.
The company is working with advisers to explore a leveraged buyout, but the talks are in early stages, the newspaper reported, citing unidentified people familiar with the situation. DocuSign’s market value was $12.8 billion as of Friday.
“As a matter of policy, DocuSign does not comment on market rumors or speculation,” a company spokesperson said.
A “pandemic darling,” DocuSign saw its sales and share price shoot up in 2020 as companies needed to handle more documents digitally with employees working remotely. Lately, revenue growth has slowed into single digits and “economic growth in 2024 could delay any significant improvement,” Anurag Rana, an analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, said earlier this month.
DocuSign, which went public in 2018, has been hurt by increasing competition from Adobe Inc.’s document business, and its valuation suffered as investors lost their taste for unprofitable software stocks. In 2022, the company named Allan Thygesen, a former Google executive, as chief executive officer, to “lead DocuSign’s next growth chapter.” The company has also undergone at least two rounds of job cuts this year, the Wall Street Journal reported in June.
While the market for document services is large, DocuSign’s prospects may remain difficult in the near term as the company “struggles to find a sustainable growth trajectory in a post-pandemic era, coupled with navigating key leadership changes and a restructuring of its sales organization,” Mark R Murphy, an analyst at JPMorgan, wrote earlier this month.
On the news of a potential sale, shares jumped as much as 15% to $64.76, the biggest intraday increase since December 2022. The San Francisco-based company’s stock was virtually unchanged this year through Thursday’s close.
A private equity purchaser is most likely, said Rana, of Bloomberg Intelligence. Large software companies such as Salesforce Inc. or Microsoft Corp. which could be logical acquirers, are likely too tied up with other issues to consider the deal, he added.