Slack’s Stock Value Hits All-Time Low
On November 8, 2019 Slack’s stock value hit an all-time low, falling 25% below the stock’s reference price of $24 on its New York Stock Exchange debut. The news follows a 50% drop in Slack’s stock value from its initial trading peak of $42 on its first day of listing.
Microsoft’s continued push to unseat Slack with its Teams offering is cited as a major reason for Slack’s slowing growth.
“The Slack solution is impressive and represents a strong growth opportunity,” Wedbush analyst Dan Ives writes. “However, we believe penetrating this next phase of enterprises will be incrementally more difficult as the Microsoft/Teams value proposition presents a major competitive hurdle going forward in sales cycles.”
Source: SoftwareReviews Slack Scorecard. Accessed November 11, 2019
Our Take
Is Slack destined to peter out as Microsoft Teams becomes enterprises’ communication tool of choice? Maybe not immediately – Slack’s key selling point against Teams is its broad integration capabilities. Indeed, Slack spent 39% of its revenue on research and development and now boasts 1,800 apps and more than 600,000 third-party developers registered on its platform. These integrations keep users on Slack, given data retrieval, colleague coordination, and task management all occur in one unified space.
Moreover, though Slack’s stock value is trading in the low $20s, this price may be more palatable to investors over a longer trading term. Building a foundation that is not based on a bubble of hype is a more secure grounding for future trading prospects.
That is, if there are future trading prospects. For though Slack integrates more broadly than Teams, Teams has recently announced partnerships to enhance interoperability with two collaboration market heavyweights: Zoom and Cisco’s Webex Teams. Given Teams now has more users than Slack and given Teams’ future interoperability with Zoom and Webex Teams, this could be a sign that Slack is slowly being pushed to the wayside of the collaboration marketplace.
Source: SoftwareReviews Microsoft Teams Scorecard. Accessed November 11, 2019