Is Slack For Sale? Deal Worth Over $17 Billion Is Possible

Slack might have a new owner soon. One company is said to be considering buying out the workspace chatting app, Slack, for over $17 billion.

Salesforce, which is a cloud-based software company, has been interested in purchasing Slack, according to the Wall Street Journal. Slack, a major business communications app, is valued at $17 billion.

Slack shares have increased as much as 32% on Wednesday, while Salesforce shares dropped about 4%.

With more people working from home since the start of the global coronavirus pandemic, services that help employees work remotely are becoming more prominent. Platforms that make working from home easier, like video chatting app Zoom and communications app Slack, are becoming more valuable as workers stay away from the office.

In the past few years, Salesforce has purchased integration platform MuleSoft, which sold for $6.5 billion and data visualization company Tableau, which was a $15.3 billion deal. The Slack purchase would be one of the largest deals, not just for Salesforce but for the industry, CNBC states.

While the exact number hasn't been announced for how much the company would sell for, it’s reported that Slack’s market cap has grown to be more than $20 billion.

This deal would sit up there with IBM’s purchase of Red Hat for $34 billion, Microsoft’s purchase of LinkedIn for $27 billion and Facebook’s purchase of WhatsApp for $17 billion.

“This would be a game-changer move for [Salesforce co-founder Marc] Benioff & Co. to further build out its collaboration engine and product footprint as cloud spending ramps across the enterprise,” Wedbush Securities’ Dan Ives told CNBC, while referring to Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff.

As of Wednesday around 2:30 p.m. ET, Slack stocks are selling for $38.65 and are up 30.66%. Salesforce stocks are selling at $248.87 and are down 4.60%.

Neither company has officially confirmed the sale. There’s no guarantee that this deal will go through.