Slack stock soars after report of IBM employee migration

Shares of Slack Technologies Inc. are up 15% in Monday trading after a report indicated that International Business Machines Corp. would be deploying access to the workplace-communications service to its more than 350,000 employees. That would make IBM Slack's largest customer, according to the report. Representatives from IBM and Slack didn't immediate respond to MarketWatch's request for comment. Wellington Group Holdings LLP also disclosed in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that it owned 31.5 million shares, or 10.8% of the Slack shares outstanding, enough to make Wellington the second largest shareholder, according to FactSet data. On Jan. 28, the Boston-based fund, with $443.5 billion in equity holdings as of Sept. 30, disclosed that it owned 27.1 million Slack shares, or 9.3% of the shares outstanding, to make Wellington the third-largest shareholder at that time. After Slack came public via a direct listing last summer, there was concern about competition from Microsoft Corp. , Alphabet Inc.'s Google, and other workplace-communications offerings. The company was the subject of a bullish initiation note from RBC Capital Markets last week, however, as an analyst there argued that the competition fears were "potentially overblown." The stock is up 30% over the past three months, as the S&P 500 has added about 8%.

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