Register for free to join our community of investors and share your ideas. You will also get access to streaming quotes, interactive charts, trades, portfolio, live options flow and more tools.
Hey Stockguard, thanks for the tip. This ticker looks interesting. Trading a little to high for me to jump in at this point. It is at 50% above fair value. It might keep going but I wont be comfortable making an entry. This boat might be leaving without me. I put a lot into VIAC last month, I'm hoping sports will come back and push it much higher than it is.
Thanks for sharing. Not sure how many investors understand why some of the forward looking financial details were withheld by the company.
The True Story Of Slack
Jun. 9, 2020
Slack, a replacement for email used by the world's largest companies, is targeting a $28 billion market.
With the rising popularity of much cheaper Microsoft Teams, many people are questioning whether Slack can survive.
However, it is clear that Slack is not only surviving but winning deal after deal vs. this practically free competitor due to a strong competitive moat.
COVID-19 has accelerated Slack adoption and should fuel strong revenue growth over the next few years as new free users are converted to paid.
Valuation is high, but as a best-in-class software player with a massive market, strong growth and operating leverage, I believe this is warranted.
"Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) Teams is free, so why would any corporation use Slack (WORK)?" is the number one statement I see when researching Slack. I admit, when I started my research, this was a prominent question in my mind, but it was soon clear that Slack is winning against Teams due to a strong moat that Teams has not been able to replicate. With a large market opportunity, high growth, and a decent valuation, I'm very bullish on Slack's future.
What is Slack
Slack is, in essence, a replacement for email. It is a remote collaboration tool that allows people to effectively work together, access hundreds of thousands of critical applications and services, and find important information to do their best work. It is a widely popular tool available in 150 countries in 8 languages, used by more than 65 of the Fortune 100.
Management estimates in the prospectus that the market opportunity for Slack and other providers of workplace business technology software platforms for communication and collaboration to be $28 billion, so there is definitely substantial room to grow from the current revenue base.
Competitive advantage
Slack mainly competes with Microsoft’s Teams. Originally, it also competed with Atlassian’s (NASDAQ:TEAM) HipChat, but that has since been sold to Slack for an undisclosed amount.
In early 2016, news broke that Microsoft was considering acquiring Slack for $8 billion, but after the opposition of Bill Gates and the departure of the employee responsible for the push, Microsoft Teams was launched in late 2016. Teams has seen relatively fast adoption due to the massive penetration of Office 365 products within corporations, as shown below.
In an update in March, Microsoft Teams disclosed that it had over 44 million DAUs, or around 20% of Office 365 users. Slack bears have often used the fast growth of Microsoft Teams in their bear case, asking how a paid product like Slack can compete with the "free" Microsoft Teams.
Interestingly, though, if you look through the last few conference calls, you can see many examples of Slack winning against Microsoft Teams, especially in the enterprise space. For example:
"Four of our five largest deals in the fourth quarter were against teams, new and expansion deals for the quarter, demonstrate the breadth of our global enterprise penetration across all industries. They include Nationwide, KPMG, HP, Rakuten, Kyocera, and Sainsbury's.
Our largest customers are also some of the largest companies in the world. Seven of our 10 largest customers are members of the Fortune 100 and 17 of our top 20 customers are members of either the Global or Fortune 500. They also tend to be Microsoft customers. As noted last quarter, the majority of our $1 million customers also use Office 365 and they made the choice to invest in Slack anyway. Behind these numbers are a lot of good stories which are just starting to be understood and appreciated now. We'll be telling more of them in the year ahead."
Why is this happening? Having used both products, I can 100% say that Slack has a better product. UI is better, search functionality is far better, and Slack has far more external applications, which is likely important for most enterprises. Microsoft Teams isn't unusable, it just isn't as good as Slack.
Slack users are also far more engaged than Microsoft Teams users. Even at the peak of the COVID-19 crisis, Teams use maxed out at 2.7 billion minutes, or around 60 minutes per day per DAU. Meanwhile, Slack users spent an average of 120 minutes per day, or twice as long as Teams.
Also, this is not often mentioned, but Microsoft Teams also imposes certain limits on users, as you can see here. In addition, Slack also has a feature, Shared Channels (that allows your company to share a channel to work together with another party), that management doesn't believe is possible to replicate without several years of development, but this feature is used by 90% of Slack's top customers (according to the Q4 2020 call). Interestingly, there is a request for Microsoft Teams to have the same feature, but it's still on the backlog as of today.
Q1 2021
COVID-19 may be nearly over, but the implications of it on Slack will likely last over the long term. In the most recent quarter, Slack added a year's worth of customers in 1 quarter, and as these customers are converted to paid customers over the next few years, it should drive s In addition, the company signed a deal with Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) to roll out Slack to all of AWS's employees in exchange for integrating AWS tools into Slack and continuing to use AWS.
Overall, it was a pretty stellar quarter, with 50% growth and high 80s gross margin. Operating leverage was substantial, with non-GAAP operating margins up 1700 bps, or 17%, from last year to just -8%. Currently, GAAP profitability is depressed, but this is due to high SBC from performance-based vesting of RSUs, which should dissipate over time.
"Stock-based compensation and related employer payroll taxes were $76 million in the quarter. It's important to note that due to the performance based vesting condition of our RSUs, stock-based compensation recognition has accelerated in the first year after going public. We expect stock-based compensation, as a percentage of revenue to trend down meaningfully over the next year."
With this much operating leverage, it likely would take just 2-3 years for Slack to reach GAAP profitability, and things should only get better after that.
Valuation
Currently, Slack sports a market cap of $18 billion, or around 20x forward revenues. This may seem high, but it really isn't that high if you consider the fact that revenue is growing at 50% YOY and is not likely to slow anytime soon due to Slack's immense competitive advantage.
Takeaway
Overall, it may seem like Slack is doomed to fail, especially when you keep hearing about Microsoft Teams expanding its user counts, but that's not really the case. Slack is winning, even when facing Microsoft Teams directly, and there's no reason to believe it can't continue to win in the future.
Yes I saw that just buy chance. CEO speaking wise is rough around the edges but believe stock will double from today`s close. Been adding as I expected this selloff. Appreciate the heads up.
See recent CEO interview CNBC Sqwak on the street. He explains this.
Where Slack Analysts Wanted More
Billings seemed to be a point of common focus. The metric generally left analysts wanting.
“We don’t think the quarterly billings number is telling the entire story here, as FQ1 billings saw $17 million of Covid/renewal-related impacts, while RPO [remaining performance obligations] was up an impressive 97% year over year (16% quarter over quarter),” wrote Wells Fargo's Turrin.
Morgan Stanley attributed Slack’s miss on investor billings expectations to a modest net dollar retention rate, which stabilized after eight consecutive quarters of sequential decline.
Sure looking like that, lets see how the market absorbs all the new stock.
6 Slack Analysts On Q1 Results, Billing Numbers, Microsoft Competition: 'An Unexpected Dichotomy' 12:36 pm ET June 5, 2020 (Benzinga) Print If there were any beneficiaries of the coronavirus pandemic, Slack Technologies Inc (NYSE: WORK) seemed to be one. The company’s first-quarter results Thursday demonstrated 50% top-line growth, reflecting rapid adoption by companies shifting to remote operations.
Slack exceeded Street expectations with $206 million in billings, $202 million in revenue, $179 million in gross profit and a non-GAAP loss per share of 2 cents.
“We’d say the company mostly delivered,” Wells Fargo analyst Michael Turrin wrote, although noting that billings growth (38%) was below investor expectations and that the full-year guidance implies sharp second-half revenue deceleration.
What Slack Analysts Liked
Revenue came in 7% above consensus estimates, and Slack’s 90,000 net new customers for the period exceeded gains from the entire previous year.
“Slack added more free orgs in F1Q ‘21 vs. entire FY ‘20, hinting at a robust upsell/conversion pipeline,” MKM analyst Rohit Kulkarni wrote.
“Long-term obligations, a proxy for Slack’s FY ’22 and beyond growth, accelerated materially, implying sticky contracts with large enterprise customers.”
Mizuho analysts were nonetheless underwhelmed by Slack’s 12,000 net paid additions, having forecasted 14,000.
“In our view they are much less impressive than they appear after factoring in a very strong start to the quarter (the co. had previously disclosed 9,000 net adds through Mar. 26),” Gregg Moskowitz wrote.
Where Slack Analysts Wanted More
Billings seemed to be a point of common focus. The metric generally left analysts wanting.
“We don’t think the quarterly billings number is telling the entire story here, as FQ1 billings saw $17 million of Covid/renewal-related impacts, while RPO [remaining performance obligations] was up an impressive 97% year over year (16% quarter over quarter),” wrote Wells Fargo's Turrin.
Morgan Stanley attributed Slack’s miss on investor billings expectations to a modest net dollar retention rate, which stabilized after eight consecutive quarters of sequential decline.
“Q1 results showed an unexpected dichotomy – while the Covid-19 crisis pushed a lot of new customers to the Slack platform (about 90,000 in total, including Free and Paid, more than Slack accrued in all of FY20), there was very little change in the propensity of existing customers to use Slack more broadly within their organizations as the net dollar retention rate was just flat on a QoQ basis at 132%,” wrote analyst Keith Weiss.
Why The Market Reacted Poorly To Slack's Q1
Kulkarni attributed Slack’s after-hours sell-off to previously overinflated buy-side expectations and the withdrawal of FY21 billings guidance. The guidance that management did provide inspired caution, he said.
Morgan Stanley's Weiss said the revenue guidance is conservative, "reflecting a challenging environment in 2H21 embedding weaker renewal rates and lower sales productivity."
What’s On The Horizon For Slack
Cantor Fitzgerald expects Slack’s strong pipeline and diversified customer base to work in its favor.
“We believe the company and its platform have a number of unique, positive attributes, including the ability to drive customer productivity and efficiency, applicability across all industries and business sizes, and a growing ecosystem to facilitate seamless integration,” analyst Drew Kootman wrote.
“We expect these attributes to lead to increased market penetration and margin expansion and believe these characteristics will allow the company to expand its multiple.”
Other analysts flagged threats in the competitive environment. Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT)’s Teams, in particular, may limit Slack’s progress.
“In our view, MSFT's competing Teams service significantly reduces WORK’s pricing power and limits the enterprise penetration opportunity,” wrote Mizuho's Moskowitz. “Further, we reiterate that MSFT considers Teams to be highly strategic, which means it is highly likely that MSFT will continue to invest substantially here for the foreseeable future.”
Wedbush agreed.
“We believe the company will have significant difficulty further penetrating the core enterprise market and MSFT installed base given the significant competitive offering from Microsoft's TEAMS product that could slow growth going forward quicker than the Street is anticipating, despite the COVID driven tailwinds,” wrote analyst Daniel Ives.
The Slack Ratings
Slack’s report generally seemed to inspire optimism.
“Like other cloud-based communications subsectors in software, we think this category is seeing a boost in terms of market awareness and willingness to spend, which bodes well both today and longer-term given the far-reaching nature of the underlying opportunity,” wrote Wells Fargo's Turrin.
Cantor Fitzgerald maintained an Overweight rating and raised its target from $30 to
Slack (WORK) - reported revenue of $201.7 million, up 50% year over year, and a non-GAAP loss per share of 2 cents. Analysts polled by FactSet were expecting sales of $188.5 million and a non-GAAP loss of 6 cents per share.
However, the company withdrew its full-year guidance for calculated billings -- a metric often viewed as a bellwether for future revenue -- citing "ongoing uncertainties surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic," according to a press release.
“Q1 was a phenomenal quarter for Slack, with the addition of 12,000 net new Paid Customers and 50% revenue growth year-over-year,” said Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield. “We believe the long-term impact the three months and counting of working from home will have on the way we work is of generational magnitude. This will continue to catalyze adoption for the new category of channel-based messaging platforms we created and for which we are still the only enterprise-grade offering.”
Slack added 963 paid customers with greater than $100,000 in annual recurring revenue last quarter, and said that 750,000 organizations were using either a free or paid plan at the end of the quarter, up 49% year-over-year.
For the current quarter, which ends July 31, Slack is guiding for total revenue of between $206 million and $209 million, exceeding analyst estimates of $200 million.
For the full 2021 fiscal year ending in January, Slack was guiding for total revenue of $855 million to $870 million, representing year-over-year growth of 36% to 38% and in range of analyst estimates of $862 million.
Heading into earnings, Slack shares were up 64% year to date.
I knew this pos was gonna tank. Thank Allah I shorted. Will buy in when it bottoms towards 17-19. And sell right before they’re gonna go bankrupt. Between Microsoft and zoom imo this is only hanging on a thread .
Slack Reports Earnings After the Close Thursday. Here’s What to Expect
By Eric J. Savitz - BARRON'S June 2, 2020 11:54 am ET
Slack Technologies shares picked a new analyst recommendation on Tuesday, two days before the collaborative communications software company’s first-quarter earnings report.
Shares of Slack (ticker: WORK) have spiked 68% year to date, as investors continue to pile into stocks perceived to be getting a boost from a widespread shift to working from home. The company’s April quarter results should give the first clear indication of any financial benefit from the trend.
When Slack reported fourth-quarter results in March, the company projected first-quarter revenue of $185 million to $188 million and a non-GAAP loss of 6 to 7 cents a share. The Wall Street analyst consensus forecast is for $187.9 million and a loss of 6 cents.
Slack projected revenue for the January 2021 fiscal year of $842 million to $862 million, with a non-GAAP loss of 19 to 21 cents a share. Street consensus for the year is $859.6 million in revenue and a loss of 20 cents a share.
For the July quarter, the Street consensus is $199.6 million and a non-GAAP loss of 6 cents per share.
Cowen analyst J. Derrick Wood on Tuesday initiated coverage of Slack shares with an Outperform rating and $45 price target. It is no coincidence that he is starting coverage before earnings: He thinks you ought to buy the stock ahead of the numbers.
Shift to remote work has just given Slack a major booster shot to its market [opportunity] that we think will accelerate adoption and lift the [total addressable market,” he writes in a research note. “The market doesn’t seem to fully appreciate this as many are caught up on the Microsoft threat overhang. But digital collaboration has just got a lot more strategic, which favors best-of-breed, and we see a re-rate coming on the heels of a strong print on Thursday.”
In short, and to translate some of Wood’s jargon, he thinks that concerns about competition in the corporate messaging market from Microsoft’s Teams software is overblown, that more customers will prefer Slack’s targeted approach over Microsoft’s broader suite of communications tools, and that Slack’s stock is headed higher.
Wood thinks the shift to remote work will have “some level of permanency,” and that adoption of Slack and similar tools becomes “must have” rather than “nice to have” for many businesses.
“Much like Zoom (ZM), Twilio (TWLO), DocuSign (DOCU), and others in these markets, we think work from home is acting as a major catalyst for market demand and customer adoption for Slack,” he writes.
The Cowen analyst thinks Slack’s shares would be a lot higher were it not for a threat from Microsoft that he thinks is exaggerated. He notes that Slack’s 35% gain since the end of February pales against gains of 70% for DocuSign, 75% for Twilio, and 95% for Zoom.
In a recent earnings preview note, Morgan Stanley’s Keith Weiss likewise wrote that Slack is poised to benefit from accelerated adoption of cloud-based collaboration and productivity tools, but he sees some offsets. Slack has a per-seat revenue model, and Weiss sees “some potential for seat churn” in a return to work scenario where some customers reduce staff or go out of business, or where some new users had low engagement with the platform and stop using it.
Unlike Wood, Weiss thinks the Microsoft threat is a real worry. “With a significant distribution advantage, Microsoft may be able to lock in more market share upfront versus what would have occurred if the opportunity had evolved slower,” he writes. “Or said another way, the rapid market adoption due to Covid-19 should enable Slack to get bigger faster, but potentially results in a lower overall market share longer-term.”
Weiss has an Equal Weight rating and $29 price target on Slack shares.
Another cautionary note: The valuation on Slack shares has risen with the substantial rally; the stock is now trading at close to 25 times current year projected revenue. The average analyst target on the stock is more than $8 below the current share price.
Slack shares on Tuesday were trading down 1.3%, at $36.74.
Zoom and Slack are worth nearly $50 billion more since coronavirus hit, and now we see the results
Published: June 2, 2020 at 12:53 p.m. ET By Emily Bary - Marketwatch
Zoom Video and Slack earnings should show how many work-from-home users are paying, and how much it is costing to support them
Zoom Video Communications Inc. said that it would prioritize security improvements after the popular videoconferencing platform faced backlash for its encryption claims and other settings.
The COVID-19 outbreak brought waves of new users to Zoom Video Communications Inc. and Slack Technologies Inc., but this week we find out how many are actually paying for the services, and how much it is costing the companies to support them.
Zoom ZM, +7.58% will report quarterly earnings Tuesday afternoon, after announcing in late April that it had 300 million daily meeting participants as companies and schools around the world rushed to adjust to widespread remote work. Slack WORK, +3.96% Chief Executive Stewart Butterfield has already disclosed to MarketWatch that “simultaneously connected” users on his software grew by 25% in a single week in March, and that Slack added 80% more many paying customers in two months than it had in full previous quarters. Slack reports Thursday afternoon.
Since both companies offer free plans with more limited feature sets, it’s still unclear just how well Zoom and Slack are capitalizing on work-from-home trends financially, even as their shares have soared in recent months. And both have had to secure the computing power necessary to support those users, adding costs that will eat into Zoom’s potential profit and further erode Slack’s losses.
The results will put nearly $50 billion in freshly minted valuations to the test. Zoom’s market capitalization crossed the $50 billion mark on its own for the first time Friday, and shares — which sold for $36 in its 2019 initial public offering — closed higher than $200 for the first time Monday. Slack is trading for its highest prices since the stock debuted last June, and is now worth more than $20 billion after riding up 68% so far in 2020. Combined, the two stocks have added roughly $48 billion in market cap since the beginning of the year, which tops the entire valuations of other prominent cloud-software names like Workday Inc. WDAY, +1.61% and Atlassian Corp. TEAM, -0.11%
Zoom has not emerged from its sudden success unscathed. Look for Chief Executive Eric Yuan to address any fallout from safety and security lapses on its platform after Zoom began facing heavy backlash in March about its encryption claims, as well as default settings that allowed those who weren’t hosting a meeting to share their screens and potentially broadcast inappropriate messages.
The criticism prompted some companies to ban the use of Zoom for corporate purposes. The New York City Department of Education also stopped using Zoom, though the school system eventually came back to the service with new security features, such as letting meeting hosts mute participants without giving them the option to unmute. Zoom ultimately made changes to its default settings for all users, clarified its encryption policies, and prioritized security improvements within its feature-development teams.
“We now have a much broader set of users who are utilizing our product in a myriad of unexpected ways, presenting us with challenges we did not anticipate when the platform was conceived,” Yuan said in an April blog post, one of a number of public writings about the company’s response to the backlash.
So how many companies did stop paying for Zoom as a result of security issues and Zoom-bombing scandals? Cantor Fitzgerald analyst Drew Kootman doesn’t believe it will be important.
“We do not expect a material impact from recent privacy/security issues as we believe the company is taking appropriate steps to improve the problem,” he wrote in an April note to clients.
Zoom’s rivals in video meetings have also pointed to big spikes in activity in recent months: Alphabet Inc. GOOGL, -0.21% GOOG, -0.19% disclosed that its Meets platform has seen a “thirtyfold increase” in usage since January, and Cisco Systems Inc. CSCO, +0.10% said Webex was running at three times its February capacity. Microsoft Corp.’s MSFT, +0.24% Teams saw “more than 200 million meeting participants” in a single day during April.
Teams is seen as a direct competitor to both companies, but especially Slack, with its ability to offer a similar text-based service and video meetings to corporate clients who may already have access through their corporate Microsoft Office cloud-software packages. Slack may have a more youthful vibe in the world of enterprise messaging apps, but still trails behind Teams in terms of its user base.
MKM Partners analyst Rohit Kulkarni believes there is room for multiple services to thrive in the market.
“The likelihood of a ‘winner takes most’ competitive dynamic outcome in the enterprise collaboration software market is quite low,” he wrote. Kulkarni models 19,000 paid net additions for the fiscal first quarter, compared with 22,000 for the entirety of Slack’s last fiscal year.
Slack will be joined Thursday afternoon by DocuSign Inc. DOCU, -0.15% , which should also be benefiting from at-home trends due to growing need for e-signatures on legal documents. Other software companies expected to report earnings this week include CrowdStrike Holdings Inc. CRWD, +6.34% , Smartsheet Inc. SMAR, +1.28% , Cloudera Inc. CLDR, +10.32% , Guidewire Software Inc. GWRE, +3.17% , MongoDB Inc. MDB, -0.40% and PagerDuty Inc. PD, +1.90%
Slack Announces Date of First Quarter Fiscal Year 2021 Financial Results
May 11 2020
Slack Technologies, Inc. (NYSE:WORK) today announced that it will report its financial results for the first quarter of fiscal year 2021, ended April 30, 2020, following the close of the U.S. markets on Thursday, June 4, 2020. Slack will host a conference call that day at 2:00 p.m. Pacific time (5:00 p.m. Eastern time) to discuss the results.
The conference call can be accessed via dial-in at 833-513-0556 from the United States or 778-560-2600 internationally. The conference ID is 8566284. A live webcast of the conference call will be available on the Slack Investor Relations website, investor.slackhq.com. Following the completion of the call, a replay will also be made available at investor.slackhq.com.
About Slack
Slack has transformed business communication. It’s the leading channel-based messaging platform, used by millions to align their teams, unify their systems, and drive their businesses forward. Only Slack offers a secure, enterprise-grade environment that can scale with the largest companies in the world. It is a new layer of the business technology stack where people can work together more effectively, connect all their other software tools and services, and find the information they need to do their best work. Slack is where work happens.
Slack’s new iPhone app hits the App Store ahead of official launch
It looks like the Android redesign that rolled out last week
By Jay Peters The Verge May 11, 2020
Slack announced a redesigned iPhone app with a new navigation bar at the bottom of the app in update notes today. However, it seems the redesign is still rolling out, even if you’ve updated to the latest version of the app — myself and another Verge colleague don’t have it yet, for example.
The new look appears to bring the iPhone app in line with the Android redesign that rolled out on May 5th. “Previously, it was complicated to get to the four main things people do on mobile,” Slack said in the App Store update notes. “We’ve fixed this with a new nifty navigation bar at the bottom of the app containing: a Home view for your sidebar, DMs, (still listed most recent first), Mentions (for quickly catching up), and You (because you’re great) (and also because setting your status/preferences on mobile needed to be easier).”
The update also adds a floating compose button in many places throughout the app as well as the ability to order your channels in the “Home” tab, much like how you can order your channels in Slack’s recent desktop redesign. You may also have to re-adjust some of your muscle memory when using the app, as some of the swiping behaviors have changed. “Now, swiping right will reveal your workspace and preferences, and swiping left will get you back to the last conversation you were in,” Slack says in the update notes. The update appears specific to the iPhone version of the app, meaning the iPad version remains the same for now.
If you don’t have the redesign yet, it seems likely the update will be available more broadly soon, since Slack has laid out all of the new features of the update in the App Store already.
The remote collaboration company could face tough competition, slowing growth, and wider losses over the next five years.
Leo Sun The Motley Fool May 8, 2020
Slack Technologies (NYSE:WORK) has been a divisive stock since its direct listing last June. The bulls claimed Slack's collaborative platform would disrupt the traditional email and messaging markets and change how people worked. The bears claimed Slack's moat wasn't wide enough to fend off rivals like Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), and that it lacked a long-term path toward profitability.
The bulls initially lifted the stock from its debut price of $26 to the high $30s, but it subsequently stumbled back to the high $20s -- even as stay-at-home measures boosted interest in the stock. Slack certainly faces a lot of near-term challenges, but will its stock climb higher over the next five years?
What do the bears think about Slack?
Slack's revenue rose 110% in fiscal 2018, 82% in 2019, and 57% in 2020. In March, it estimated its revenue would rise 34%-37% in fiscal 2021, which ends next January. Slack's growth remains robust, but the bears believe its revenue growth could peak before it ever generates a profit. Slack expects its non-GAAP net loss to narrow from $0.28 per share in 2020 to $0.19-$0.21 in 2021, but its GAAP net losses -- which include big stock-based compensation (SBC) expenses -- could still widen.
On a GAAP basis, Slack's net loss widened from $138.9 million in 2019 to $568.4 million in 2020. SBC expenses, as a percentage of its revenue, jumped from 6% to a whopping 68% as the company expanded its workforce and subsidized salaries with big stock bonuses. That percentage should decline in 2020, but it highlights Slack's dependence on stock bonuses as it attempts to expand with negative cash flows.
Moreover, Microsoft recently revealed that its answer to Slack, Teams, had reached 75 million daily active users -- up from 44 million in March. Slack hasn't updated its daily active user count since last October (when it reached 12 million), and only recently revealed its platform hosted a peak of 12.5 million concurrent users in late March.
Microsoft is bundling Teams with its other Office 365 services, and that aggressive strategy -- which leverages its dominance of PC operating systems and productivity software -- could hurt Slack. Microsoft was reportedly interested in buying Slack four years ago, but it clearly believes it can crush it instead.
Slack's stock also isn't cheap relative to those of its peers. The stock trades at about 18 times the midpoint of its revenue forecast for fiscal 2021, and its slowing revenue growth, widening GAAP losses, and narrowing moat all make it tough to justify that premium.
What do the bulls think about Slack?
The bulls believe Slack's revenue growth will stabilize as it grows its base of larger customers. It also recently expanded its user base by acquiring Stride and HipChat Cloud from Atlassian.
Last quarter, Slack's total paid customers grew 25% annually to 110,000. 893 of those customers generated over $100,000 in annual recurring revenue, up from 645 a year earlier. 47% of its revenue came from those larger clients, up from 41% last year.
Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield recently dismissed the notion that Microsoft was a serious threat during a CNBC interview, noting that less than 30% of Microsoft's Office 365 users were using Teams. That percentage could rise, but it also suggests that there are still plenty of companies that don't wish to be tethered to Microsoft's ecosystem. Moreover, Slack's platform is already integrated with most of Microsoft's Office apps.
Slack's non-GAAP gross margin also expanded last year, which indicates it still has pricing power, and its free cash flow -- while negative -- is improving. Therefore, Slack's GAAP losses could eventually narrow as it weans itself off its dependence on stock bonuses. Slack was still holding $767 million in cash, cash equivalents, and marketable securities at the end of 2020, with zero debt -- so it won't be run off the road by Microsoft anytime soon.
Last but not least, Slack remains an attractive takeover target for other companies. Slack's valuation and enterprise value of $14 billion are a bit high, but cash-rich tech giants like Amazon, Cisco, and Alphabet's Google -- which all offer remote collaboration platforms -- could still be interested.
So where will Slack be in five years?
I believe the bear case against Slack is slightly stronger than the bull case. Slack's CEO might publicly dismiss Microsoft Teams as a rival, but its SEC filings clearly list Microsoft as its "primary competitor."
Slack's revenue growth will likely decelerate over the next five years, and it could struggle to narrow its losses while widening its moat. It could also be forced to issue debt or secondary stock offerings to maintain its cash flow. Those challenges, along with Slack's frothy valuation, could cause its stock to tread water and underperform other tech stocks over the next five years.
The Motley Fool owns shares of and recommends Alphabet (A shares), Alphabet (C shares), Amazon, Atlassian, Microsoft, and Slack Technologies and recommends the following options: long January 2021 $85 calls on Microsoft, short January 2021 $115 calls on Microsoft, short January 2022 $1940 calls on Amazon, and long January 2022 $1920 calls on Amazon. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
Slack Is Beefing Up Its Balance Sheet
The enterprise messaging company prices an upsized bond offering to raise capital.
Evan Niu (TMFNewCow) Apr 8, 2020
Earlier this week, enterprise messaging and collaboration platform Slack (NYSE:WORK) announced a $600 million proposed offering of convertible senior notes, which included an option for institutional investors to collectively buy up to $90 million more of the debt. The company subsequently said it upsized the deal to $750 million while pricing the convertibles. In other words, Slack had no trouble finding buyers for its paper.
Here's what investors need to know about Slack beefing up its balance sheet.
Building the war chest
For context, Slack finished its most recent fiscal year that ended in January with around $769 million in cash and cash equivalents but excluding restricted cash. The $750 million that Slack is looking to raise will meaningfully strengthen the tech company's financial position, nearly doubling that cash while buying it time as it continues to work toward cash flow breakeven.
"And I just want to highlight, the [guidance] points us to getting to cash flow breakeven at the high end," CFO Allen Shim said on the last earnings call. "So consistent with what we have said in the past, we're going to invest in growth, but we're also going to make real steady progress to cash flow breakeven."
The company is not yet profitable and free cash flow and operating cash flow remain negative for the time being. Operating cash flow last fiscal year was negative $12.4 million, and free cash flow was negative $62 million.
In an interview with CNBC, CEO Stewart Butterfield acknowledged that the company was really trying to get ahead of potential economic impacts from the COVID-19 pandemic. "We're not immune to the overall macroeconomic conditions, but the initial response for slack has been a massive surge in interest," Butterfield said.
The chief executive pointed to a data point he had previously shared in an epic tweetstorm: In the first two months of the fiscal quarter, Slack has added 9,000 new paid customers, compared to the 5,000 new customers that Slack added in each of the prior two full quarters. Average utilization per user is also skyrocketing.
Butterfield also added that the offering was oversubscribed, which is partially what allowed Slack to upsize the deal and raise even more capital. Slack's customer base is quite diverse, including companies in the travel and hospitality sectors that are getting destroyed by the coronavirus outbreak. Offsetting some of that exposure is the fact that other large organizations are accelerating their Slack deployments, according to Butterfield.
The convertibles carry a 0.50% interest rate and will come due in 2025. The bonds will have an initial conversion price of $31, or a 27.5% premium to where the stock closed on Monday. In connection with the offering, Slack has entered into capped call transactions, a common hedging strategy that companies use when issuing convertibles that reduces the potential dilution related to any note conversions.
Was The Smart Money Right About Slack Technologies Inc (WORK)?
Insider Monkey Asma Husna May 10, 2020
Hedge funds don't get the respect they used to get. Nowadays investors prefer passive funds over actively managed funds. One thing they don't realize is that 100% of the passive funds didn't see the coronavirus recession coming, but a lot of hedge funds did. Even we published an article near the end of February and predicted a US recession. Think about all the losses you could have avoided if you sold your shares in February and bought them back at the end of March. In this article we will take a closer look at hedge fund sentiment surrounding Slack Technologies Inc (NYSE:WORK).
Hedge fund interest in Slack Technologies Inc (NYSE:WORK) shares was flat at the end of last quarter. This is usually a negative indicator. The level and the change in hedge fund popularity aren't the only variables you need to analyze to decipher hedge funds' perspectives. A stock may witness a boost in popularity but it may still be less popular than similarly priced stocks. That's why at the end of this article we will examine companies such as Ubiquiti Inc. (NYSE:UI), China Eastern Airlines Corp. Ltd. (NYSE:CEA), and Cna Financial Corporation (NYSE:CNA) to gather more data points. Our calculations also showed that WORK isn't among the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds.
Hedge funds' reputation as shrewd investors has been tarnished in the last decade as their hedged returns couldn't keep up with the unhedged returns of the market indices. Our research was able to identify in advance a select group of hedge fund holdings that outperformed the S&P 500 ETFs by more than 41 percentage points since March 2017 (see the details here). We were also able to identify in advance a select group of hedge fund holdings that'll significantly underperform the market. We have been tracking and sharing the list of these stocks since February 2017 and they lost 35.3% through March 3rd. That's why we believe hedge fund sentiment is an extremely useful indicator that investors should pay attention to.
We leave no stone unturned when looking for the next great investment idea. For example, this investor can predict short term winners following earnings announcements with 77% accuracy, so we check out his stock picks. A former hedge fund manager is pitching the "next Amazon" in this video; again we are listening. We read hedge fund investor letters and listen to stock pitches at hedge fund conferences. Our best call in 2020 was shorting the market when S&P 500 was trading at 3150 after realizing the coronavirus pandemic’s significance before most investors. Now let's take a glance at the new hedge fund action surrounding Slack Technologies Inc (NYSE:WORK).
How are hedge funds trading Slack Technologies Inc (NYSE:WORK)?
At Q4's end, a total of 29 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were long this stock, a change of 0% from the third quarter of 2019. So, let's see which hedge funds were among the top holders of the stock and which hedge funds were making big moves.
More specifically, Light Street Capital was the largest shareholder of Slack Technologies Inc (NYSE:WORK), with a stake worth $83.5 million reported as of the end of September. Trailing Light Street Capital was Tiger Global Management LLC, which amassed a stake valued at $45.1 million. 12 West Capital Management, Citadel Investment Group, and Citadel Investment Group were also very fond of the stock, becoming one of the largest hedge fund holders of the company. In terms of the portfolio weights assigned to each position Thrive Capital allocated the biggest weight to Slack Technologies Inc (NYSE:WORK), around 9.09% of its 13F portfolio. Light Street Capital is also relatively very bullish on the stock, designating 4.99 percent of its 13F equity portfolio to WORK.
Judging by the fact that Slack Technologies Inc (NYSE:WORK) has faced a decline in interest from hedge fund managers, we can see that there lies a certain "tier" of fund managers that slashed their entire stakes in the third quarter. Intriguingly, James Woodson Davis's Woodson Capital Management sold off the biggest position of the "upper crust" of funds monitored by Insider Monkey, valued at close to $14.5 million in stock, and Andrew Bellas's General Equity Partners was right behind this move, as the fund said goodbye to about $13.4 million worth. These moves are intriguing to say the least, as aggregate hedge fund interest stayed the same (this is a bearish signal in our experience).
Let's also examine hedge fund activity in other stocks similar to Slack Technologies Inc (NYSE:WORK). These stocks are Ubiquiti Inc. (NYSE:UI), China Eastern Airlines Corp. Ltd. (NYSE:CEA), Cna Financial Corporation (NYSE:CNA), and Equitable Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:EQH). All of these stocks' market caps resemble WORK's market cap.
These stocks had an average of 18.5 hedge funds with bullish positions and the average amount invested in these stocks was $485 million. That figure was $295 million in WORK's case. Equitable Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:EQH) is the most popular stock in this table. On the other hand China Eastern Airlines Corp. Ltd. (NYSE:CEA) is the least popular one with only 1 bullish hedge fund positions. Slack Technologies Inc (NYSE:WORK) is not the most popular stock in this group but hedge fund interest is still above average. Our calculations showed that top 10 most popular stocks among hedge funds returned 41.4% in 2019 and outperformed the S&P 500 ETF (SPY) by 10.1 percentage points. These stocks gained 1.0% in 2020 through May 1st but still beat the market by 12.9 percentage points. Hedge funds were also right about betting on WORK as the stock returned 17.3% in 2020 (through May 1st) and outperformed the market. Hedge funds were rewarded for their relative bullishness.
Slack CEO: Working From Home Will Become Less Stressful -- Barrons.com
BY Dow Jones & Company, Inc. 05/07/2020
The stock began trading last summer at $38.50, fell as low as $15 and change during the Covid-19 stock crash in March, and has since bounced back to $27 as investors have embraced services that seem well suited to the work-from-home economy. Barron's recently spoke with Slack CEO and co-founder Stewart Butterfield about how the $15 billion company competes with email, why at-home workers feel stressed, and how big Slack can become. His edited comments follow.
On describing Slack:
We say that Slack is a channel-based messaging platform. What if all of [your] emails were organized by project or subject instead of by date? And what if everyone who should have access to it magically did without having to have been CC'd on it in the first place? In Slack, communication moves from in-boxes, which are kind of inherently individual- first, to what we call channels. And channels put the organization or the team first.
You end up creating a channel for more or less everything that's happening across the company. That might be every customer, business unit, office location, team, event, sales process. Everyone knows where to go to answer their question or to get caught up on something. That's really transformative.
On the work-from-home economy:
That's probably a net good [for us]. Slack is not specifically a tool that's designed to support remote work. It's designed to improve the return on communication. For a manager and executive, that's more or less 100% of the job. It's reading and writing emails. It's one-on-one meetings. It's creating or sitting through presentations. But there's a big chunk of that that's just really basic acts of communication and coordination, keeping everyone on the same page, making people aware of decisions. If you can get any leverage on that, it has an impact that's disproportionate to any other changes you can make.
In an environment where people are working from home, absent the normal catch-up routines and communication that they would have had in the office, all of that becomes more important than ever. If this continues, I think the whole world gets pushed -- for some organizations, maybe three or six months, and for other organizations, three or five years -- down this path of inevitability towards digital transformation. That's good for us. And I think it's good for the whole software industry.
On at-home workers feeling isolated or stressed:
There are dozens of little features [in Slack] that try to make it easier for people to give social signals in an environment where they don't have the normal body language. Things like emoji reactions. A whole visual language develops around how people show appreciation or support for one another.
We have had people working from home -- not a huge portion of the workforce, maybe like 5% -- for a long time. They have home offices, and they have child care, and they can take breaks and go sit in a cafe and watch people go by and stuff like that. So I think that a lot of the stress [now] comes from everything else. The macroeconomic uncertainty. The fear around people's health. But also, just on a more practical level, not everyone had a home office set up.
Now you're arguing with your spouse about who gets which part of the kitchen table to do the next video call. And you have a 3-year-old and a 5-year-old, and there's no day care or preschool or school and no nannies and no grandparents available to help. And the kids are going bananas and being cooped up in the house. So that's not normal. If there is a lasting impact in terms of the percentage of people who are working from home, I think it will be much less stressful because people will actually be prepared for that. And when they feel like it, they can still go out and get a haircut or watch a movie or have a drink at the bar.
On how big Slack can become:
We think the core market is really huge because what it ends up doing is replacing the use of email internally. I don't mean in every respect for every organization, but the bulk of it. And we see that manifest with customers that have really significant drops in the use of email. But also things like the meetings. We have 110,000 paid customers as of now. Some of those are huge multinationals with 100,000-plus employees. Some of them are five-person small businesses. There's no reason we shouldn't have a much larger share of, just in the U.S., the 2 1/2 million businesses that have five or more employees.
On making videogames, then co-founding the photo service Flickr, and then co-founding Slack:
I started college in 1992, so just before the web started taking off. The use of computing technology to facilitate human interaction has just fascinated me ever since. It's now 28 years since then. My summer job all the way through college was web designer because there were not that many people who could do it. I worked through the dot-com crash and have been involved in a bunch of companies, some consumer, now enterprise.
We made massively multiplayer games. We made massively multiplayer photo-sharing software, massively multiplayer workplace software. To me, it's a lot of the same ideas. People have a persona or an identity. They're able to send messages. They're able to form groups. There's a sense of presence. Those are common elements to how networks can improve the lives of people and create new possibilities for interactions that wouldn't have otherwise been possible.
Slack is developing technology to enable its users to make phone calls directly to Microsoft Teams users as work-at-home becomes the new norm amid the coronavirus pandemic.
Motely Fool By Donna Fuscaldo Mar 27, 2020
Slack (NYSE:WORK) is putting its rivalry with Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) aside, announcing its working to integrate its digital chat and collaboration tool with Microsoft's Teams.
During a conference call with Wall Street firm RBC, Slack co-founder, and CEO Stewart Butterfield said Slack is developing voice technology to integrate with Teams, CNBC reports. Once it's completed, Slack users will be able to make calls directly to Teams users without leaving the platform.
Butterfield didn't say when the integration would be ready, but it does highlight how important digital collaboration tools and video conferencing are becoming. as millions of people work-at-home amid the COVID-19 pandemic. That's been driving huge demand for Slack, Teams, and Zoom Video Communications (NASDAQ:ZM), the video conferencing start-up.
Since the end of January, Microsoft's Teams has seen a 500% increase in usage in China alone. Demand is surging in the U.S. as well. Microsoft said last week that Teams has more than 44 million daily users, with it growing by about 12 million users in just seven days.
Slack hasn't said how many users it's gained since the pandemic started but the company did say it's seeing unprecedented demand.
Shares of the workplace messaging platform are up more than 65% in recent weeks.
Motley Fool Daniel Sparks Mar 31, 2020 at 6:33AM
As many companies and governments around the world are urging workers and citizens to stay at home amid the coronavirus outbreak, some companies -- and their stocks -- are taking a beating. But a lucky few are actually benefiting from this shift. Likely beneficiaries include video streaming, videoconferencing, and online collaboration companies. Unsurprisingly, shares of these businesses are rising as investors bet the coronavirus pandemic will accelerate adoption of these technologies.
Slack Technologies (NYSE:WORK), with its channel-based instant messaging platform, is one company likely to see a substantial boost from this work-from-home trend. Following the company's fourth-quarter report earlier this month, however, shares of the messaging platform initially fell. Investors were likely expecting more impressive guidance since the coronavirus outbreak was already resulting in travel restrictions and more virtual working -- two macro factors investors expected to be a boon for the company. But management noted at the time that it had opted to be conservative about its financial outlook given the uncertainty in the enterprise sector due to the outbreak.
Since this fourth-quarter update, however, much has changed. Indeed, Slack's CEO recently took to Twitter and shared some data on the company's recent mind-boggling growth during the coronavirus outbreak. Following its post-earnings sell-off, the stock has surged. Since March 16, Slack shares are up more than 65%.
Here's a look at five key metrics likely helping propel Slack stock higher lately.
1. Q4 revenue jumped 49%
While Slack's fiscal fourth quarter ended on Jan. 31, before many organizations around the world started urging their employees to work from home, it's worth noting that the tech company's revenue for the period did easily beat analyst estimates. Total revenue rose 49% year over year to $181.9 million. Analysts, on average, were expecting revenue of $174.1 million.
2. Slack has $769 million of cash
It's also worth emphasizing that Slack has a healthy balance sheet -- a helpful asset if the economy does enter a recession. The company ended Q4 with $769 million in cash, cash equivalents, and marketable securities and zero debt. In addition, Slack is on track to become free cash flow positive in the near future. Free cash flow was negative-$0.8 million in Q4, an improvement from negative $31.1 million in the year-ago period as Slack's business sees significant operating leverage.
3. 12.5 million users connected simultaneously Between March 10 and March 25, simultaneously connected users on the company's platform rose from 10 million to 12.5 million.
4. Team creation spiked
Between the company's fourth-quarter update on March 12 and March 25, the "creation rate of new Slack workspaces (which the company believed to be created by businesses) increased by hundreds of percent," management said in a press release about the CEO's tweetstorm last Thursday.
5. New paid customers already crossed 9,000 in Q1
Importantly, all of this usage and creation of new teams is translating to substantial growth in paid customers. Less than two months into fiscal Q1, the company has added 9,000 new paid customers -- 80% more than total quarterly net paid customer additions in either of the two previous quarters.
Suffice it to say, Slack is undoubtedly benefiting from the coronavirus outbreak -- and the company will likely easily blow past its fiscal first-quarter guidance.
Slack Targeting Cash Flow Breakeven Before Profitability
The enterprise messaging company's capital-light model should help bolster free cash flow.
Motely Fool By Evan Niu Jun 20, 2019
Slack (NYSE:WORK) isn't the first unprofitable company to go public in recent memory, and it certainly won't be the last. It's rather rare for tech companies to be profitable when they go public (Zoom Video, which made its market debut in April, is unusual in this regard). The key consideration is whether those companies have a path to profitability on the horizon.
First things first, though, and Slack wants to get to cash flow breakeven before worrying about its GAAP bottom line.
Cash flow over accounting profits
In an interview with Bloomberg, CFO Allen Shim and CEO Stewart Butterfield discussed Slack's prospects going forward. Shim said Slack is primarily focused on cash flow that can be invested in the enterprise messaging company's future:
Well our primary focus right now is to invest in growth. And as we continue to build on what we think is a new category, that's going to be our focus for a long time. But we've also said to investors that our near-term priority is to drive toward cash flow breakeven. We have high confidence in the strong unit economics of our business that we can still invest very aggressively while driving toward that near-term profitability mark.
Butterfield elaborated on why cash flow is more important than GAAP profitability:
In [software-as-a-service], there's a lot of deferred revenue so accounting profitability isn't that much of a priority. As Allen was saying, bringing in more cash than we put out on an ongoing basis is a priority because it allows us to control our own destiny. The ideal for us though is that we continually find new ways and new opportunities to invest to further grow the business, so we don't need a lot of free cash flow. Just a little bit.
Earlier today, Butterfield noted that the reason Slack used a direct listing to go public instead of a traditional IPO was that the company simply doesn't need to raise capital right now, so there's little reason to dilute existing shareholders. Getting to cash flow breakeven would further reduce the need to raise capital, and Slack already has nearly $800 million in cash reserves.
A familiar capital-light model
For reference, here's how Slack's operating cash flow and capital expenditures (the two components of free cash flow) have performed over the past three fiscal years (Slack's fiscal years end in January):
The company notes that in 2017 and 2018, it made some cash payments related to tender offers and share repurchases, which Slack considers compensation (since it's buying back shares that were granted as equity-based compensation).
Slack utilizes a capital-light model that's becoming all too familiar these days by outsourcing cloud hosting and infrastructure to third-party providers, namely Amazon Web Services (AWS). Slack spends about $50 million per year on AWS. Much of Slack's capital spending over the past fiscal year has been leasehold improvements, which jumped from $26.2 million to $86.3 million.
The company opened a new office in San Francisco last year in order to get its employees into one building after rapidly growing head count, which more than doubled from January 2017 to nearly 1,700 at the end of April 2019.
Slack and two other recent tech IPOs are in a good position to withstand the worst of the COVID-19 crisis.
Leo Sun Apr 7, 2020 at 10:57AM
The initial public offering (IPO) market has ground to a halt over the past month as the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has forced several private companies to postpone their public market debuts. But as investors await the next batch of new offerings, now might be a good time to look back at some recent tech IPOs to see how they are doing and whether they have proven resilient throughout the broader market downturn that has dominated the news over the past two months. Here are three recent IPOs worth revisiting.
1. Slack Technologies: Well-insulated from the current crisis
Slack's (NYSE:WORK) platform helps employees connect with each other via messaging and collaboration tools. Usage of these services should surge throughout the COVID-19 crisis as more people are forced to work from home for long stretches.
Slack went public via a direct listing -- where employees of the company offer their existing shares for sale to the general public rather than creating new shares for initial offer -- last April. The stock currently trades slightly below its initial price of $26 a share due to concerns about its slowing growth, lack of profits, and competition from rivals like Microsoft Teams.
However, Slack still enjoys a first-mover advantage and is growing at a healthy clip. Its revenue rose 57% to $630.4 million last year as its total number of paid customers with over $1 million in annual recurring revenue jumped by 39%. Slack expects its revenue to rise 34%-37% in fiscal 2021, with a narrower net loss.
Slack's business remains well-insulated from the COVID-19 crisis, and it's an attractive option for companies that don't want to tether themselves to big tech companies like Microsoft. Slack's stock isn't cheap at 16 times this year's revenue, but its resilience throughout the pandemic could justify that premium valuation.
2. Pinterest: Growing rapidly despite the crisis
Pinterest (NYSE:PINS) also went public via a direct listing last April, and it still trades below its initial price of $19 per share. Pinterest got off to a strong start, but the stock was eventually weighed down by concerns about its slowing growth (especially in the U.S.) and its lack of profits.
The coronavirus crisis also cast doubts on the future of its core advertising business, which was evolving into an e-commerce platform when the pandemic struck. That shift, which let users shop via pins and retailers upload their entire catalogs to the platform, was widening its moat against Facebook's Instagram and other social networks.
Yet Pinterest is still growing rapidly. Its revenue rose 51% to $1.14 billion last year as its monthly active users grew 26% to 335 million and its average revenue per user rose 21% to $3.81. Most of its user growth is coming from overseas markets, but its domestic users still generated 90% of its revenue.
Pinterest expects its revenue to rise by 33% in 2020 as it monetizes more pins via ads and e-commerce features. Its ad growth could decelerate throughout the coronavirus crisis, but its user base should continue expanding as people spend more time at home. The stock is also reasonably valued at less than six times this year's sales.
3. GSX Techedu: Benefiting from the need to stay at home
Last June, the Chinese online education company GSX Techedu (NYSE:GSX) went public at $10.50 per ADS. The stock has more than tripled since then, as the coronavirus outbreak in China unexpectedly lit a fire under its remote learning services.
GSX's live streaming platform allows instructors to teach up to 100,000 students per session, and it claims to only hire certified teachers instead of freelancers. It also develops its own in-house curriculum instead of relying on third-party materials.
GSX's revenue surged 432% last year, its gross billings jumped 413%, and its net income soared 659%. Its total enrollments increased by 258% to 2.74 million. It didn't provide guidance for the full year, but it expects its revenue to rise 303%-311% annually in the first quarter.
Those growth rates are phenomenal, but GSX still faces intense competition in China's online education market, and it's increasingly dependent on free trials and promotions. The stock is also richly valued at 120 times forward earnings. Nonetheless, investors seeking a speculative play that can weather the coronavirus crisis should take a closer look at this multi-bagger stock, which could still have more room to run.
More than 95,000 organizations are paying for subscription plans, as of April 30, 2019. Slack generated revenue of $400.6 million in the year ended Jan. 31, 2019, an 82% increase from the previous year, but growth is slowing. Slack is still not profitable and posted a net loss of $138.9 million in FY 2019.
Apr. 21, 2020 About: International Business Mach(IBM)| By: Brandy Betz, SA News Editor
During yesterday's Q1 call, IBM (IBM -3.1%) management mentioned a "pause" in client spending last month that was most pronounced in the software segment.
Other software names seeing red include Fortinet (FTNT -7.8%), Cloudflare (NET -6.2%), Slack (WORK -6.5%), Salesforce (CRM -5.6%), and Oracle (ORCL -3.9%).
News 
Market Data 
Discover 
