Shack shares rose 32% on Wednesday following a Wall Street Journal report that Salesforce was in talks to buy the company.
Salesforce’s stock fell around 4% on the news.
Under the agreement, the agreement is likely to cause Slack to exceed the $ 17 billion market ceiling. However, Slack’s market cap has risen to more than $ 20 billion following the WSJ report.
Salesforce has taken on a takeover boom, taking advantage of the market cap growth in recent years to buy growing companies. In 2018, it acquired MuleSoft, the company’s largest deal to date at the time, for $ 6.5 billion to connect cloud applications. The following year, it spent more than twice that amount on Tableau, acquiring the data-display company for $ 15.3 billion.
Loose would be one of the biggest software deals for the industry. IBM lists $ 34 billion in Red Hat purchases in 2019, Microsoft’s $ 27 billion in LinkedIn purchases in 2016, and Facebook’s $ 19 billion in WhatsApp purchases in 2014.
“This would be a game-changing move for Benioff & Co. to further increase the collaboration engine and product footprint while cloud-based spending rises across the enterprise,” Wed Iush, an employee at Wedbush Securities, told CNBC, chief executive of Salesforce. Marc Benioffra.
The deal is not guaranteed and negotiations could fail, the Wall Street Journal wrote.
Microsoft shares, which compete with Slack through its Teams offering, were also slightly immersed in the report.
Microsoft is already competing with Salesforce in customer tracking software. Microsoft allegedly investigated the acquisition of Salesforce, but no deal was established. Later, Microsoft launched the Teams communications application.
“Our primary competitor right now is Microsoft Corporation,” Slack said when he wanted to become a public company in 2019. Microsoft has a large customer base that it has been able to transform into Teams, and Salesforce could provide a similar advantage to Slack.
Slack last announced in October 2019 that it has more than 12 million active users a day.
Spokespersons for Salesforce and Slack were not immediately available for comment.
– CNBC Ari Levy and Jordan Novet contributed to this report.
This is an evolving story. Please check for updates.
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