Zendesk this morning agreed to promote itself to an investor consortium for $10.2 billion in money, or $77.50 per share. The deal comes months after the U.S. software program firm declined a $17 billion offer.
The Zendesk saga of 2021 and 2022 has been sophisticated, stuffed with twists and turns. That it’s closing out its life as a public firm by promoting at a reduction to a deal it rejected earlier within the yr underscores each how quickly the market has repriced the value of software revenues and the way a falling share worth can result in administration decisions right this moment that run counter to that very same management crew’s perspective a number of brief quarters in the past.
Let’s run via a refresher on the deal itself, focus on the ultimate price ticket in gentle of Zendesk’s newest earnings outcomes and shut with a brief riff on what the transaction might portend for unicorns and smaller public expertise firms alike.
How did Zendesk get right here?
As we speak’s information doesn’t seem like a great signal for undervalued SaaS firms, however Zendesk has navigated a variety of tough challenges all through this yr that led to this inauspicious conclusion. First, it turned down that $17 billion provide in February, a transfer we reported on the time that made activist investing agency Jana very unhappy. Whereas Jana fumed, Zendesk continued to function based mostly by itself sense of its worth — one, by the way in which, that TechCrunch agreed with in our analysis of that spurned deal.
If Zendesk believed it was price extra, why promote? But there was extra happening than that.
At about the identical time, Zendesk had been attempting to finish a deal to purchase Survey Monkey’s guardian firm, Momentive, for $4.1 billion. Zendesk believed that this deal would speed up income in the long term and push the corporate into the rising area of buyer expertise. As soon as once more, Jana wasn’t happy, and it and different traders rejected the deal, leaving Zendesk in a clumsy place with no speedy solution to make up the projected income it believed was coming from that deal.
Zendesk execs went again to the drafting board and accomplished a strategic evaluation simply two weeks in the past, vowing at that time to stay unbiased, a transfer that resulted in a punishing day on Wall Avenue with its stock plunging in value. That stood till this morning, when the corporate determined the most effective transfer was to promote.
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