(Bloomberg) -- Shutterfly Inc., the online retailer working with a financial adviser to review strategic alternatives, has drawn interest from Apollo Global Management LLC and Cerberus Capital Management, according to people familiar with the matter.
The buyout firms are weighing separate bids for the Redwood City, California-based company, said the people, who asked to not be identified because the matter isn’t public. Both have discussed financing options with lenders, the people said.
Shutterfly’s shares rose as much as 13 percent and were up 8.7 percent to $42.30 at 3:38 p.m. in New York trading Wednesday, giving the company a market value of about $1.5 billion.
Representatives for Shutterfly, Apollo and Cerberus declined to comment.
Shutterfly, which sells personalized frames and photo albums online, hired an adviser to review strategic alternatives after receiving interest from potential buyers, it announced in February. It also said that Chief Executive Officer Christopher North plans to step down in August.
Shutterfly’s shares have declined more than 50 percent in the past year amid lower-than-expected earnings and other issues.
Shutterfly has been in play before.
In 2016, one of Shutterfly’s largest shareholders pushed it to pursue a strategic review after the company disclosed that it had received an expression of takeover interest from a private equity firm. That firm was Thomas H. Lee Partners, a person familiar with the matter said at the time.
Two years earlier, Silver Lake shelved plans to attempt to buy and merge both Shutterfly and Snapfish, which had been owned at the time by Hewlett-Packard Co.
To contact the reporters on this story: Gillian Tan in New York at gtan129@bloomberg.net;Kiel Porter in Chicago at kporter17@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Alan Goldstein at agoldstein5@bloomberg.net, ;Elizabeth Fournier at efournier5@bloomberg.net, Matthew Monks, Michael Hytha
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