By Greg Roumeliotis
(Reuters) – Cloud-based software company Salesforce.com Inc has approached workplace messaging app Slack Technologies Inc with an acquisition offer, a source told Reuters on Wednesday.
Salesforce sees the move as a logical extension of its enterprise offerings, the source said, adding there is no certainty of a deal.
Both companies were not immediately available to comment.
Slack Technologies jumped 24%, while Salesforce fell 2.7% after the Wall Street Journal first reported the news.
Shares of Slack, which has a market value of $16.87 billion as per Refinitiv data, have been underperforming since the company’s market debut last year as it failed to cash in on the rise in number of users working remotely during the pandemic.
Meanwhile, Salesforce has been beefing up its cloud business through acquisitions and had spent more than $16 billion last year to fend off competition from rivals such as Oracle Corp and German competitor SAP.
Shares of rival Microsoft Corp, which owns Teams chat and conferencing app, were down 0.5% in afternoon trading.
(Reporting Greg Roumeliotis in New York, Subrat Patnaik and Eva Mathews in Bengaluru; Editing by Arun Koyyur)
