According to another person familiar with the matter, Mark, the founder and CEO of Salesforce, has been looking for acquisition opportunities and has been looking for multiple targets.
According to the first report by Dow Jones, publisher of the Wall Street Journal, the news made Slack's stock rise more than 23% in Wednesday's trading. The report indicates that this transaction may make Slack's market value exceed the current $17 billion. However, there is no guarantee that an agreement will be reached and negotiations may fail.
Due to the surge in cloud software spending, Salesforce has become one of the biggest winners of the epidemic. In contrast, Slack, an application used by workers to collaborate and access other cloud applications, failed to catch up with this year's "work from home" wave, and its stock lags behind its hot cloud software competitors. The
acquisition will strengthen Mr. Mark (the founder of Salesforce) to challenge Microsoft’s efforts to make it the leading cloud software provider for office workers, thereby making Slack a Salesforce user who leverages the company’s applications (including its core customer relationship Management service). Microsoft Teams, established by
as a competitor of Slack, has become a window into other applications of the software group (including its CRM software), and may provide it with a way to surpass Salesforce.
Since the pandemic hit the United States in early March, Salesforce’s stock has more than doubled, allowing many office employees to work from home and prompting companies to digitize their operations. Slack's stock, which entered Wall Street through a direct listing last year, has fallen behind after two consecutive quarters of disappointing earnings. Before the news of negotiations with Salesforce came out, although the cloud computing software industry soared by 78% this year, their transaction prices on the first day of last year were 23% lower than their closing prices.
Slack co-founder and CEO Stewart Butterfield (Stewart Butterfield) will have a great say in the outcome of the negotiations. Under the special class of voting stocks, he can personally control approximately 42% of Slack's votes due to his ownership of Slack shares and voting agreements with other investors.
In recent years, the acquisition of Salesforce is very important. It acquired Tableau Software, a production data analysis software, for about $16 billion in 2019, and a year ago the company acquired Mulesoft, a network software manufacturer, for $6.5 billion.
However, Benioff said in August this year that the high valuation of the software company made it difficult to reach a deal. He said in a conference call with analysts: “For companies like Salesforce, we don’t really see the M&A environment.” A person familiar with the matter said, because Benioff wanted to use Salesforce’s own wealthy market valuation as a transaction. Currency, so a large part of the offer to buy Slack may be stocks. Z1z
