Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff. Salesforce.com is target of takeover interest, a report says.(Photo: Jack Gruber, USA TODAY)
SAN FRANCISCO — Shares of Salesforce.com soared to a record high on a report that the cloud-computing company has hired financial advisers to field takeover inquiries.
Salesforce.com (CRM ) closed up 12% to $74.65 and continued to climb in extended trading Wednesday after Bloomberg reported that the company was approached by a potential suitor. The report did not name the suitor.
"The space is set to be consolidated, and I think the street has been waiting for the game-changer acquisition," said FBR Capital Markets analyst Daniel Ives.
Wall Street may long for this kind of mega acquisition, but analysts remain skeptical because of the massive price tag.
Salesforce.com is up 26% for the year and 47% in the past 12 months. The company has a market value of nearly $50 billion, said S&P Capital IQ analyst Scott Kessler. That would make a takeover the largest ever of a software company.
"It would definitely be pretty significant," Kessler said. "Obviously, at that size, there are only a handful of companies that could presumably do something along those lines."
That prompted speculation that Oracle, Microsoft or SAP could be among the companies vying for Salesforce.com.
That would represent an aggressive push into cloud computing for these technology giants. Each of them already have their own customer relationship management software, but they lag behind Salesforce.com in market share, according to research firm Gartner.
UBS analyst Brent Thill says there is a "low likelihood" of a deal at this scale.
And, Thill added, there's little incentive for Salesforce.com to sell.
"Usually when you sell, you have run out of runway," Thill said. "They haven't run out of runway."
Trading was briefly halted in Salesforce.com because of stock volatility.
A Salesforce.com spokeswoman declined to comment.
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