And that’s that, as the Zoom deal to buy Five9 is called off

Talk about a roller coaster ride.

Zoom, the video conferencing company that became everyone’s primary means of communication around work during the pandemic, will no longer be acquiring Five9, a maker of cloud-based customer-service software. Though the all-stock deal, announced in July, was expected to enable Zoom to tap into the lucrative contact center market, a few major hiccups along the way seemingly led to today’s decision.

First, Zoom’s shares, which moved in nearly a straight line toward the sky over the last couple of years, have more recently come under pressure, so the deal for Five9, which was valued at $14.7 billion in July, would have been considerably less today given that Zoom’s shares were trading at around $360 when the deal was announced and are now trading at closer to $260 per share.

It certainly didn’t help matters that, last week, Zoom disclosed that a U.S. Justice Department-led panel has been investigating the tie-up over concerns that it might create national security risks, given Zoom’s ties to China.

Founder Eric Yuan is a naturalized American citizen who was born in China and moved to the U.S. as a 27-year-old in 1997. Zoom also said last year that it had mistakenly routed some meetings through servers in China. And in June of last year, Zoom shut down the account of an activist who was using the platform to commemorate China’s Tiananmen Square crackdown. Afterward, the company, which, in the past, at least, has said a sizable part of its development team is in China (as is the case with many multinational companies), said it wouldn’t permit requests from the Chinese government to impact anyone outside of mainland China.

Still, the figurative nail the coffin might have been a recommendation two weeks ago by the proxy advisory firm Institutional Shareholder Service that Five9 shareholders vote against the acquisition, citing concerns about Zoom’s slowing growth. That advice appears to have been heeded, with Five9 today issuing a news release that the merger plan had been “terminated by mutual agreement” between the two companies.

At this point, the market was expecting as much, evidently. Shares of both Zoom and Five9 barely budged on the news.

Source Link And that’s that, as the Zoom deal to buy Five9 is called off