Australia OKS Salesforce’s $37B Slack Acquisition

The Australian competition regulator has approved the proposed acquisition of collaboration software firm Slack by CRM giant Salesforce for US$37 billion, stating the deal was unlikely to lessen competition.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) on Thursday, May 20, announced that it would not oppose the planned acquisition announced by Salesforce last December and is still awaiting US regulator approval.

The deal is the biggest in the CRM giant’s 21 year history and will see it compete with Microsoft in another market, with the companies already competing in sales, productivity and data visualisation software.

The ACCC considered the effect of the acquisition on the supply of CRM solutions and the supply of team collaboration software in Australia during a 50-day review that began in March.

“Salesforce and Slack mostly supply different software with distinct purposes, so there is minimal direct competitive overlap between them,” ACCC Chair Rod Sims said.

“We focused on whether Salesforce having both CRM and team collaboration solutions could give rise to a substantial lessening of competition.”

Mr Sims said most interested parties raised no concerns with the deal and if Salesforce did engage in anticompetitive bundling or foreclosure customers had several alternatives in the likes of Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, and Adobe. Microsoft’s Teams products also offers an alternative to the Slack software, he said.

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