ACCC gives go-ahead to Salesforce's Slack acquisition

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has revealed it will not oppose Salesforce’s proposed acquisition of Slack.

The agency said it was unlikely that the acquisition would result in Salesforce preventing Slack’s rivals in team collaboration solutions from competing effectively, and that Salesforce’s rivals in CRM solutions won’t be competitively disadvantaged.

Salesforce announced in December 2020 that it would acquire Slack for US$27.7 billion as both companies look to take on Microsoft, whose own Teams collaboration software saw sizable huge market traction and user adoption at the time.

“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.”

Sims added that most interested parties raised no concerns over the deal, and that market participants said they would switch CRM providers if Salesforce engaged in anti-competitive bundling or foreclosure conduct, like Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and Adobe.

“We consider, due to commercial and reputational risks, that Salesforce would be unlikely to disadvantage competitors by degrading interoperability between Salesforce’s CRM solution and competitors’ team collaboration solutions, or between Slack’s team collaboration solution and competitors’ CRM solutions,” Sims said.