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San Francisco (AP) - It is the biggest tech deal of the Corona era: The SAP competitor Salesforce wants to swallow the office chat provider Slack for almost $ 28 billion.
The software group is betting that even after the end of the pandemic, more will be communicated digitally than before.
At the same time, the takeover also shows the limits for medium-sized players in today's tech industry: Slack also benefited from increased home work in Corona times - but not as much as Zoom, for example.
Slack will be valued in the deal with a total of 27.7 billion dollars (around 23 billion euros), Salesforce announced after the US market closed on Tuesday.
Among other things, the amount is based on the current Salesforce rate.
Slack shareholders will receive $ 26.79 and 0.0776 Salesforce shares per share.
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The founder and head of Salesforce, Marc Benioff, was anything but modest when it came to the outlook on the effects of the deal.
Together, the companies would shape the future of business software and in this way change how people work in a digital world, he enthused.
Slack should also be integrated into Salesforce products.
With its web-based software for tasks such as customer management and data analysis, among other things, Salesforce is an important competitor of the German SAP group.
Before founding Salesforce in 1999, Benioff had a career with SAP rival Oracle.
Under the Salesforce umbrella, he brought together a number of additional offers such as the office software Quip and the data analysis service Tableau.
With Chatter, there was also a Slack competitor in-house, but it remained a niche product.
Slack, which is based in San Francisco just a few hundred meters from the new Salesforce tower, debuted in 2013. The office communication platform quickly became popular with start-ups and, over time, also in larger companies.
Founder and boss Stewart Butterfield floated Slack last summer with a valuation of around $ 20 billion.
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The 47-year-old Butterfield was one of the founders of the photo platform Flickr, which they sold to the web pioneer Yahoo in 2005 for a few tens of millions of dollars.
Measured against prices that were achieved a little later for online services in this league, Butterfield and Co got out for far too little money.
At Slack, he has repeatedly emphasized in recent years that he is not interested in a sale.
At the time of the IPO, he controlled around 18 percent of the Slack shares.
In the Corona crisis, Slack grew by around 50 percent year-on-year in each of the previous quarters.
The business did not develop as explosively as, for example, with the video conferencing service Zoom, where the revenues multiplied.
In the summer, Slack filed a complaint with the EU Commission against Microsoft and accused the software giant of unfair competition because it bundles its competing application teams with the office software Office.
This was seen by some observers as a sign that Slack is struggling to compete directly with the heavyweights of the industry.
© dpa-infocom, dpa: 201202-99-538252 / 2