By
Godfrey Benjamin
April 18th, 2024
Salesforce officially announced plans to acquire the world’s biggest CRM and data visualization company Tableau for a whopping a $15.7 billion.
Just recently, Salesforce announced in a press-release an already approved all-stock deal worth $15.7 billion with the goal of acquiring the world’s #1 CRM and data visualization company Tableau. Salesforce is an American cloud-based software company.
In a press release, Salesforce explains that Tableau has more than 86,000 organizations around the world that rely on the data which Tableau provides them in a very easy way. Additionally, Salesforce revealed that Tableau as a company will basically stay the same and will be positioned to scale under the Tableau brand and will operate independently.
“Joining forces with Salesforce will enhance our ability to help people everywhere see and understand data,” says Adam Selipsky, the President and CEO of Tableau.
“As part of the world’s #1 CRM company, Tableau’s intuitive and powerful analytics will enable millions more people to discover actionable insights across their entire organizations. I’m delighted that our companies share very similar cultures and a relentless focus on customer success. I look forward to working together in support of our customers and communities.”
Both of these companies are publicly traded and will involve that Class A and Class B Tableau (DATA) stocks will be exchanged for 1.103 of common Salesforce shares.
However, experts point out that last week on Friday, the overall Tableau company market cap was valued at $10.79 billion. Now when Salesforce has confirmed the $15.7 valuation, this means that in just a few days, Tableau has seen a massive increase in its overall valuation.
Also, the DATA stock price saw a heavy price increase of almost 34%. The price went from $125 to $170 in just couple of days. On the other side, you couldn’t say that about Salesforce – their stock price actually fell 5%. All-in-all, trading of Tableau stocks has been halted because of this news.
This is Not the First time Salesforce Wanted to Acquire Tableau
In 2016, a hacktivist group “DC Leaks” published a presentation which was dug out of Colin Powell’s dump e-mails. In the presentation it was clear that Salesforce had been thinking about this move for some time. They had listed two similar companies – Tableau and Qlik Technologies as the possible targets.
At that time both companies wanted this fact to be kept in secret. Salesforce commented that this kind of a presentation is definitely not an indication of plans to buy a company. Tableau simply didn’t comment on the issue.
In addition to this, an interesting fact is that Salesforce wanted to buy LinkedIn as well, but in a tight bidding war, Microsoft won and got the company for $26.2 billion. Apparently, Salesforce’s last offer was $85 in cash plus stock that equaled $200 per share before LinkedIn chose Microsoft. Microsoft, on the other hand, offered $196 in cash per share and the two companies announced the deal on June 13, 2016.