San Francisco, Feb 11 (IANS): Microsoft reportedly held talks in recent months to acquire the $51-billion social media firm Pinterest, the media reported on Thursday.

According to The Financial Times, the tech giant aimed to acquire Pinterest, a platform popular for sharing and discovering recipes, home ideas, style inspiration and other ideas, to create a portfolio of active online communities that could run on its Cloud computing platform.

"The talks were currently not active, said one of the people briefed," the report said.

Both Microsoft and Pinterest declined to comment on the report.

Pinterest, whose market value increased more than 600 per cent during the pandemic, plans to remain an independent company.

Microsoft earlier made an attempt to acquire TikTok but the deal did not materialise.

The tech giant has acquired some significant companies under CEO Satya Nadella, like LinkedIn for $26 billionand open source code repository GitHub for $7.5 billion.

Microsoft also cacquired private gaming company ZeniMax for $7.5 billion last year.

Pinterest reported strong fourth quarter financial results last week, with $706 million in revenue.

The company's US revenue jumped 67 per cent (year over year) to $582 million while its international revenue was up 145 per cent year over year to $123 million.

Pinterest said its international user base expanded 46 per cent to 361 million.