Wednesday afternoon, the Wall Street Journal reported that Salesforce.com, inc. (NYSE: CRM) is in late-stage merger talks with Slack Technologies, Inc. (NYSE: WORK).

Salesforce is a cloud-computing solutions giant geared toward large business clients. Slack, which enables workflow collaboration and hosts chat, is geared toward small firms and startups.

Slack’s market cap at the open was $21 billion. At writing, the stock price was up more than 30% on the day.

Salesforce, with a market cap near $220 billion, fell about 4% after the news broke.

This is typical of a merger involving two publicly traded companies. The one being acquired will usually surge toward the buyout price. It’s not unusual for the acquiring company to fall some.

A deal could be announced as soon as next week. Both companies have declined to comment publicly. So the potential buyout price is still a mystery.

If the deal goes through, this would be Salesforce’s largest acquisition to date. Slack could use the cash infusion, too.

Slack has a relatively low market share with 12 million active users per day compared to the industry leader Microsoft’s Teams with 75 million.

Since the pandemic began, Slack has been burning cash at unsustainable rates.

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