Salesforce Buys Slack For $27.7 Billion

It was reported yesterday that Salesforce is officially buying Slack on December 1. The company has almost completed its acquisition now and announced it officially.

For some, Slack is nothing more than ‘IRC with colorful pictures’, for others the future of collaborative work in times of the coronavirus pandemic. The software giant Salesforce is one of the latter. The CRM maker is buying Slack for nearly $28 billion.

As expected, Salesforce announced after the publication of its latest business figures yesterday evening that Slack is ready for a takeover. According to its own statements, the software manufacturer pays a total of 27.7 billion dollars and thus an unexpectedly high sum for a provider of applications with which its users should actually only communicate with their colleagues.

Salesforce pays a decent bonus

Slack’s investors receive $ 26.78 for each share, plus shares in Salesforce, around 55 percent more than the share was worth about a week ago before the takeover negotiations were announced. Salesforce wants to make Slack an important part of its range of solutions for “Customer Relation Management” in the future, but the provider should continue to work as an independent unit under Salesforce.

Marc Benioff, head of Salesforce, spoke of the “most strategic combination in the history of software” and that he sees huge opportunities for a common future for the two companies. Salesforce wants to integrate Slack into its services, among other things, that help companies around the world to maintain relationships with their customers. Among other things, it is about creating a world in which everyone can work from anywhere, it said.

Slack currently has more than 12.5 million users using the platform at the same time. The company profited massively from the coronavirus pandemic, in which many companies prefer to let their employees work from home to protect against infections at work. Critics see the price to be paid by Salesforce as completely excessive, also because Microsoft offers a very similar product with Teams and is surprisingly successful.