Slack shares stumble after dismal outlook

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When you're a newly-listed company like Slack Technologies- providing a dismal outlook in your first post-IPO earnings announcement will get you quickly deleted.

At one point, shares of the corporate messaging tech company slumped more than 16 percent Thursday, putting the stock on track for its worst day since its June stock market debut.

But the stock recovered a bulk of those losses to end down 3-1/2 percent.

The problem? The kind of fast growth investors thought they were paying for when they bought the stock debut isn't happening. Slack warned of a bigger third-quarter loss, slower revenue growth and higher costs as it tries to fight off a behemoth-of-a-competitor in Microsoft.

That software giant has a rival messaging service called Teams, which in July had over 13 million daily active users... that's 3 million more than Slack had.

Slack is at a clear disadvantage since Microsoft can leverage the widespread usage of its Office 365 to offer Teams for free.

Investors aren't sticking around to see how this David versus Goliath battle settles out - shares of Slack have fallen straight down since their spectacular debut and are threatening to break below the key $26 price set right before they started trading on Wall Street.

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