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Digital communication in the office: Salesforce takes over chat provider Slack

2020-12-03T00:39:40.679Z


The SAP competitor Salesforce wants to take over the chat provider Slack. Salesforce boss Benioff calls the more than 27 billion dollar merger plans a "wedding in heaven".


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Slack app on a mobile phone: Fierce competition with Zoom and Microsoft teams

Photo: Ashley Landis / AP

The cloud computing provider Salesforce wants to swallow the office chat provider Slack for more than $ 27 billion.

The software group is betting that even after the end of the pandemic, more will be communicated digitally than before.

At the same time, the takeover shows the limits for medium-sized players in today's tech industry: Slack also benefited from increased home work in Corona times - but not as much as Zoom, for example.

In addition, there is stiff competition from Microsoft's Teams software, which is often sold in the Office bundle.

In the corona crisis, Slack grew by around 50 percent year on year in each of the previous quarters.

Slack will be valued at $ 27.7 billion in the deal, Salesforce announced after the US market closed on Tuesday.

Among other things, the amount is based on the current Salesforce rate.

Slack shareholders will receive $ 26.79 and 0.0776 Salesforce shares per share.

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.

However, the founder and head of Salesforce, Marc Benioff, has high hopes for the deal.

He spoke of a "wedding in heaven" - a phrase that ex-Daimler boss Jürgen Schrempp once also used for the merger with Chrysler, which failed after a few years.

Together, both companies would change the future of business software, how people work in a digital world, enthused Benioff.

Slack should also be integrated into Salesforce products

Slack competition in-house remained a niche product

With its web-based software for tasks such as customer management and data analysis, among other things, Salesforce is an important competitor of the German SAP group.

Before founding Salesforce in 1999, Benioff had a career with SAP rival Oracle.

Under the Salesforce umbrella, he brought together a number of additional offers such as the office software Quip and the data analysis service Tableau.

With Chatter, there was also a Slack competitor in-house, but it remained a niche product.

Slack, which is based in San Francisco just a few hundred meters from the new Salesforce Tower, debuted in 2013. The office communication platform quickly became popular with start-ups and, over time, also in larger companies.

Founder and boss Stewart Butterfield floated Slack last summer with a valuation of around $ 20 billion.

47-year-old Butterfield was one of the founders of the Flickr photo platform.

Measured against prices that were achieved a little later for online services in this league, Butterfield and Co got out for far too little money.

At Slack, he has repeatedly asserted in recent years that he is not interested in a sale.

Icon: The mirror

apr / dpa / Reuters

Source: spiegel

All business articles on 2020-12-03

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