Under Analysis
How Microsoft Is Foiling Slack’s Road to Profitability
The bulls didn’t want to talk — so here’s what a bear analyst thinks about Slack’s chances in the marketplace
Under Analysis is a Marker column where experts and analysts weigh in on a prominent company’s future prospects. Today, Dan Ives of Wedbush lays out the bear case for Slack.
Slack has become an object lesson for what can happen — even if you are a popular, widely used unicorn — if you end up in the bullseye of an even larger animal, namely Big Tech. The messaging platform is struggling under an aggressive attack by Microsoft, whose Teams platform directly challenges Slack and undermines bulls who sent its share price soaring when it IPO’d last June.
Since the IPO, Slack’s share price has plunged by 49%. It is still losing money. Teams is reporting 20 million users, against about 12 million for Slack. Investors are shorting some 24% of its outstanding shares.
Against this hurricane, Brent Bracelin, an analyst with Piper Sandler, told clients in a note Monday that he was maintaining his overweight rating on Slack (the equivalent of a buy) with a $30 target, 40% higher than yesterday’s close. Bracelin, in other words, is a bull (as most analysts…
