Salesforce.com has agreed to buy Tableau Software in an all-stock deal valued at US$15.3-billion in a major bid to build its analytics offering.
The takeover of Tableau will be Salesforce’s largest deal to date. Co-CEOs Marc Benioff and Keith Block have been chasing new markets to reach an annual revenue goal of $26-billion to $28-billion by the 2023 financial year.
Tableau will remain headquartered in Seattle and will continue to be led by CEO Adam Selipsky, a former Amazon.com executive who has been transitioning Tableau’s software tools to cloud-based subscriptions.
Each share of Tableau class A and class B common stock will be exchanged for 1.103 shares of Salesforce common stock, the companies said in a statement on Monday. The deal price represents premium of 42% to Tableau’s closing price on Friday.
Known for its chart applications and analytics dashboards, Tableau has been broadening its product line to include data clean-up and machine learning tools, enabling it to compete in the wider data warehousing market.
Salesforce sees the deal cutting its full year adjusted earnings per share outlook by $0.37 to $0.39 to $2.51 to $2.53/share. Bank of America Merrill Lynch is serving as exclusive financial adviser to Salesforce and Goldman Sachs is serving as exclusive financial adviser to Tableau. Salesforce shares were down 4.4% in early trading in New York. — Reported by Giles Turner and Yueqi Yang, (c) 2019 Bloomberg LP
