Salesforce no longer sells Slack directly in Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan | Hacker News Reader

Salesforce no longer sells Slack directly in Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan

6 pointsdt0606 comments

Received email from Slack

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Hello,

As you may know, on July 24, 2019, Salesforce and Alibaba announced a strategic partnership, establishing Alibaba Cloud as the exclusive provider of Salesforce CRM to customers in mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan, as described in more detail here. In connection with this partnership, Slack (a Salesforce company) will not be renewing subscriptions in these regions. We’re contacting you because you’re an Admin of an impacted workspace.

You may maintain access to Slack by purchasing via Alibaba Cloud, a Salesforce reseller. You can do so with the steps listed below: - Navigate to the Contact form - Enter your organizational details and contact information - From the How can our sales team help you? dropdown, select I want to buy licenses or upgrade. - In the Anything else form, enter “Purchase Slack via Alibaba Cloud” - A member of our team will reach out and guide you through the next steps.

If you do not take action, we will suspend access to your Slack workspace, NAME_REMOVED, effective February 1, 2026. Your workspace and all associated data will be deleted within 90 days thereafter. If desired, workspace owners can perform an export of workspace data with the steps listed in our Help Center prior to February 1, 2026.

If your team would like to delete your workspace after exporting workspace data, the Primary Owner of your workspace can do so in the workspace settings. If you're not the person in this role, contact your Primary Owner for help.

Regards, The Team at Slack

As a smaller team we got a different email, no alternative just termination:

We are writing to let you know that due to changes in how Salesforce services are provided in mainland China, Slack will no longer be renewing your workspace.

We’re contacting you because you’re an Admin of an impacted workspace. Effective February 1, 2026, we will suspend all access to your workspace and you will no longer be billed for your paid workspace. After this date, your team will not be able to access your workspace. You will receive a refund for your unused contract. Your workspace and all associated data will be deleted within 90 days of February 1, 2026.

Yes I have received the same. Do you know what to do next? I have been contacting both Slack team and our sales rep at Alibaba Cloud, but haven't heard anything yet.

I also reached out to them but didn’t hear back.

They have replied to me. Seems that Slack is no longer selling in China mainland, neither by SFDC nor by Alibaba Cloud.

However if your are a Hong Kong entity, then you can purchase via Alibaba Cloud.

Yes I am gonna try to change the country setting for our workspace too... Not sure if this would work.

further media coverage

https://www.theinformation.com/briefings/salesforces-slack-s...

Salesforce’s Slack has told customers in mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan that they must migrate their accounts to partner Alibaba Group before February, if they want to continue with instant-messaging service, according to a Slack customer in mainland China and an Alibaba Cloud employee.

The move is in response to a privacy and data security law that came into effect this year in mainland China, according to the Alibaba employee, adding that Alibaba has started helping Slack customers with the change in recent days.

Some Slack customers with billing addresses in these four regions were told earlier this week that their subscriptions wouldn’t be renewed, according to the Alibaba employee. They were told they could maintain access by buying the service through Alibaba Cloud, according to emails reviewed by The Information.

A Salesforce spokesperson said that “Slack workspace creation and user provisioning are not currently supported in all markets. Our paid customers can provision individual user access for employees working anywhere legally permitted.” Alibaba didn’t reply to a request for comment.

Salesforce and Alibaba announced a strategic partnership in 2019 in which Alibaba would be the exclusive cloud provider of Salesforce services in these four regions, but that agreement wasn’t put into full practice until the recent days.

Salesforce is the latest U.S. company to separate its Chinese customer service, after Zoom in 2020 and Microsoft’s LinkedIn in 2021 began working with local partners or replaced their services with a local product, underscoring the deepening technological divide between the U.S. and China as companies increasingly operate on separate networks.

I changed the address in [workspace].slack.com/admin/billing/settings in hopes that it helps.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com