Salesforce to buy Slack for $27.7 billion

We reported last week that Salesforce was reportedly in advanced talks to buy Slack and Slack’s shares started to rise following this news emerged. Salesforce today announced that the two companies agreed on a deal. 

According to the updates shared by the two companies, Salesforce will pay $27.7 billion to buy Slack, one of the most popular services in the business world. Let’s add that the $27.7 billion acquisition is Salesforce’s largest acquisition to date. To remind you, the biggest acquisition ever made by Salesforce was the acquisition of Tableau in August 2019 for $15.7 billion.

According to the statement, Slack shareholders will own $26.79 in cash and 0.0776 Salesforce shares for the shares they hold. Salesforce co-founder and CEO Marc Benioff stated that Salesforce and Slack will shape the future of enterprise software together. “This is a match made in heaven. Together, Salesforce and Slack will shape the future of enterprise software and transform the way everyone works in the all-digital, work-from-anywhere world,” he said. 

“As software plays a more and more critical role in the performance of every organization, we share a vision of reduced complexity, increased power and flexibility, and ultimately a greater degree of alignment and organizational agility. Personally, I believe this is the most strategic combination in the history of software, and I can’t wait to get going.” said Stewart Butterfield, Slack CEO and Co-Founder.

According to data from Yahoo and Google Finance, Slack’s current valuation is over $ 25 billion. Having gained important competitors with Microsoft and Facebook developing their own business-oriented communication software, Slack started to lose its market share to Microsoft especially recently.

Let us remind you that Salesforce, just like Slack, is in competition with Microsoft. Salesforce has been competitive with Microsoft only in the cloud business. Salesforce has also become a competitor with Microsoft in a new area by buying Slack.

Salesforce has been looking for a customer-facing product for some time, according to The Financial Times. The company, aiming to strengthen its hand against Microsoft in this way, seems to have found what it was looking for in Slack.