the times | Wednesday December 2 2020 2GM 45
Business
the company would be valued at
$34.8 billion when share options and
other executive stock packages are
taken into account, or about $30 billion
without.
Airbnb, founded in 2008, is a popular
online service that allows homeowners
to let spare rooms or entire properties
for short periods. The loss-making
company makes money by charging
fees to guests and hosts.
Brian Chesky, co-founder and chiefexecutive, launched a drastic cost-cut-
ting operation in April as the pandemic
ravaged the business. He sacked 1,800
employees, a quarter of the company’s
workforce, slashed expenses and raised
$2 billion in debt from banks and exist-
ing investors.
Mr Chesky, 39, and his fellow co-
founders Joe Gebbia, 39, and Nathan
Blecharczyk, 37, together will sell shares
in the company worth $96 million
when it makes its debut on the NasdaqThe battle to cater for increased home
working intensified last night when
Salesforce said that it was buying Slack
Technologies, the workplace messag-
ing app, for $27.7 billion.
The biggest deal in the cloud com-
puting company’s history is intended to
bolster its challenge to the much larger
Microsoft.
Marc Benioff, Salesforce’s chairman
and chief executive, called the deal “a
match made in heaven”.
“Together, Salesforce and Slack will
shape the future of enterprise software
and will transform the way everyone
works in the all-digital, work-from-
anywhere world,” he said.
Slack shareholders will receive
$26.79 in cash and 0.0776 shares of
Salesforce’s common stock for each
Slack share, equivalent to $45.5 per
share. The offer represents a premium
of 54 per cent since the reports of a
potential deal emerged last week.
Slack shares fell by 0.3 per cent to
$43.75 in after-hours trading on Wall
Street , valuing the company at $25 bil-
lion, while Salesforce’s stock was down
4.2 per cent at $231.54, giving it a valua-
tion of $220 billion.
The takeover comes as Slack strug-
gles to fully capitalise on the switch to
remote working during the Covid-19
pandemic in the face of fierce competi-
tion from Microsoft’s Teams and other
workplace apps. Slack, founded in 2013,
provides software that has become
popular as an alternative to email,
allowing groups of employees to chat,
collaborate and share documents. The
company, based in San Francisco, was
co-founded by the British-born Cal
Henderson, 39, from Cambridge, who
serves as its chief technology officer.
Salesforce, which yesterday reported
a 20 per cent increase in third-quarter
revenue of $5.42 billion compared with
the same period last year, has become a
popular cloud-based customer rela-
tionship management platform. It was
co-founded by Mr Benioff, 56, in San
Francisco in 1999 and was recently pro-
moted to the elite 30-strong Dow Jones
industrial average index.Salesforce
picks up
Slack in
$27bn deal
Robert Miller
There had been suggestions that António Horta-Osório would return to Portugal
Lloyds chief to be chairman of
the board at Credit Suisse bank
The outgoing chief executive of Lloyds
Banking Group will walk straight into a
new job as chairman of Credit Suisse.
The appointment will mean that
António Horta-Osório will leave
Lloyds in April, earlier than expected,
and will move to Zurich. He will be the
first non-Swiss chairman of the bank.
Lloyds is poaching Charlie Nunn, a
senior HSBC executive, to replace Mr
Horta-Osório, but it may be a few
months before he can join, in which
case William Chalmers, the bank’s chief
financial officer, will take charge.
There had been speculation about
what Mr Horta-Osório would do after
Lloyds. He was appointed in 2011 and
had steered it through a series of chal-
lenges after the financial crisis.
Some had expected the Portuguese
to take up a government role in his
home country. He took British citizen-
ship during his time at the bank,
prompting speculation that he might
remain in London. He opposed Brexit.
Mr Horta-Osório will replace Urs
Rohner at Credit Suisse on May 1,
subject to a vote at the bank’s annual
meeting on April 30. Mr Rohner will
have been in the job for twelve years, a
limit that he set himself two years ago.
Credit Suisse has been through a
tumultuous period, including an
internal spying scandal that led to the
departure of Tidjane Thiam as its chief
executive in February.
Mr Thiam, a French and Ivorian
citizen, retained the support of several
large shareholders, but on leaving
hinted that he had not been fully
accepted.
“In Switzerland there are differences
in how people feel about me,” he said. “I
cannot change who I am. I am right-
handed. If people don’t like right-hand-
ed people, I am in trouble as I cannot
become left-handed.”
Credit Suisse, which has a large
investment bank and wealth manage-
ment operation, unlike Lloyds’ focus in
retail banking, is working its way
through legacy problems. It said in a
statement yesterday that it faced a
potential $680 million penalty in the
United States over residential mort-
gage-backed securities in a legal dis-
pute that dates back a decade.
Mr Horta-Osório said: “I look for-
ward to working closely with the board
and management team to build on the
group’s many strengths. This is a time of
great opportunity for the group, its
people, clients and shareholders.”
The banker also has held a series of
roles at Santander, including in Portu-
gal and Brazil before running its UK
operation between 2006 and 2010.
Andrew Coombs, an analyst at
Citigroup, said of the move to Credit
Suisse: “We would expect him to be a
somewhat active chairman, supporting
new chief executive Thomas Gottstein,
albeit we note he has limited experi-
ence of investment and private bank-
ing, or dealing with US and Swiss regu-
lators, given his historic focus on retail
and commercial banking and the UK
and Portugal, respectively.”Katherine Griffiths Banking Editor
FRANCESCO GUIDICINI/THE SUNDAY TIMESexchange on December 10. The three
men will be made paper billionaires
several times over: Mr Chesky owns
15.4 per cent of the company and Mr
Gebbia and Mr Blecharczyk each own
14.2 per cent.
Last year Airbnb was valued privately
at $31 billion, making it the world’s fifth
largest start-up, but the company’s
emergency debt-raising exercise in
April is thought to have valued the
business at about half that.Five-star value sought by spare-room specialist Airbnb
Airbnb is seeking to go public at a
valuation of almost $35 billion months
after the company was valued at less
than half that.
The room-sharing service is aiming
to raise as much as $2.85 billion from an
initial public offering next week, a
regulatory filing showed yesterday.
It plans to sell 51.9 million shares at
$44 to $50. At the top end of that range,
James Dean US Business Editor