Reuters/Mike Blake
- Salesforce sold its Zoom stake last quarter, a regulatory filing revealed this week.
- Marc Benioff’s software titan potentially made as much as $600 million in profit, depending on when it sold.
- Salesforce bought 2.8 million shares in the video-conferencing group for $100 million in April 2019, and Zoom’s stock price has surged more than 500% since then.
- The company also exited its Dropbox position and sold most of its SurveyMonkey shares.
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Salesforce cashed out its stake in Zoom Video Communications last quarter, potentially scoring a 600% return in 14 months, according to a regulatory filing this week.
Marc Benioff’s enterprise-software company spent $100 million to buy about 2.8 million shares in the video-conferencing platform immediately after it went public last April.
Salesforce paid $36 a share at the time. Zoom’s stock has skyrocketed this year due to soaring demand for remote-communication tools during the coronavirus pandemic, and traded between $114 and $254 last quarter.
Based on that price range, Salesforce likely received between $317 million and $705 million, depending on when it sold its shares. As a result, its return on investment was probably between 200% and 600%.
Salesforce also sold its 2.2 million shares in cloud-storage specialist Dropbox last quarter, and slashed its stake in SurveyMonkey by more than 70% to around 376,000 shares, according to the same filing.
It may have raked in as much as $75 million from those disposals, depending on the timing of the sales.
Salesforce has cashed out most of its public-stock holdings over the past year. It held substantially larger positions in Dropbox and SurveyMonkey, as well as stakes in Lyft and Twilio in the second quarter of 2019.
Here’s a chart showing Zoom’s astounding stock-price gains since its IPO:
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