Wednesday, December 02, 2020
Salesforce strikes: The cloud pioneer grabs the troubled messenger service Slack for 26 billion dollars. It is the most expensive acquisition in the company's history. The SAP rival is even putting more money on the table for the communication platform than previously expected.
The SAP competitor Salesforce is taking on the office chat provider Slack for $ 26 billion. "We are made for each other," said Salesforce boss Marc Benioff, celebrating the most expensive takeover in the company's history on Tuesday after the US stock market closed. Together, both companies would fuel the trend of being able to work from anywhere in the world. Salesforce, which has grown strongly through acquisitions in the past, is paying the price in shares as well as cash. On Wall Street, the two papers gave way after hours.
The slack paper had recently increased significantly since insider reports about the upcoming takeover became known. Salesforce put more on the table than originally expected. The offer comes at a time when Slack, unlike many other technology groups, has problems profiting from the digitization trend in the corona crisis. Above all, the fierce competition from Microsoft's Teams software, which is often sold in the Office bundle, makes it difficult for the company to attract paying business customers. That's why Slack recently had to grant discounts more often in order not to be completely replaced by teams or other applications.
In the third fiscal quarter at the end of October, which continued to be dominated by the Corona crisis, Salesforce's sales climbed 19 percent on a currency-neutral basis to $ 5.42 billion. At the same time, the cloud pioneer from San Francisco raised its revenue forecast for the fiscal year to around $ 21.1 billion. The company that dominates the customer management software (CRM) market is benefiting from the home office trend. As a result, companies have to rely more on computing capacities and applications from the cloud so that their employees can act remotely. The German competitor SAP lowered its forecast for the second time in October.
. (tagsToTranslate) business (t) acquisitions and mergers (t) Messenger