enterprise

Salesforce's Asia-Pacific CEO is leaving as part of a leadership revamp in the region

APAC CEO Ulrik Nehammer is just one of four executives leaving the company.

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Salesforce is shaking up its leadership in the APAC region.

Photo: Stephen Lam/Getty Images

Salesforce is overhauling its leadership team in the Asia-Pacific region, Protocol has learned.

APAC CEO Ulrik Nehammer, Chief Customer Officer Stan Sugarman, Chief Operating Officer Dan Bognar and EVP Lee Hawksley are all leaving Salesforce, according to a company spokesperson. Nehammer, Sugarman, Hawksley and Bognar did not respond to requests for comment.

At Salesforce, Nehammer led the vision for the whole APAC region. Some of his direct reports will now report to Pip Marlow, the CEO of Salesforce Australia and New Zealand, per the spokesperson. Sugarman was in charge of stimulating growth in the market, a lucrative region that includes China and burgeoning corporate hubs such as India and Singapore. Hawksley helped lead the APAC sales team, while Bogner oversaw operations including sales strategy and workforce development.

It's unclear what prompted the executive revamp. Sales in the region were up 24% year-over-year in the nine months through October to $1.4 billion. That's compared to a 34% revenue growth in Europe and 24% rise in the U.S. in the same time frame to $3.2 billion and $10.7 billion, respectively. Overall, the APAC region accounted for roughly 10% of Salesforce's total revenue in the last full fiscal year.

The shakeup comes nearly 10 months after former co-CEO Keith Block left Salesforce, a departure that led to Gavin Patterson assuming the role of CEO of Salesforce International, which includes Europe, Latin America and Asia. It also comes shortly after the company laid off roughly 1,000 employees across the globe, including in the Singapore office, Salesforce's regional APAC headquarters.

More recently, Salesforce made the splashy $27.7 billion purchase of workplace collaboration provider Slack, the company's most expensive acquisition to date. It's generally viewed as a move by CEO Marc Benioff to more directly challenge Microsoft and its Teams platform in the lucrative and increasingly competitive workplace collaboration marketplace.

Some analysts and industry experts praised the deal and labeled it a key opportunity for Salesforce to expand beyond customer relations management software. Others have raised concerns that the acquisition might signal that organic growth is slowing, a point underscored by a major sell-off of Salesforce's stock in the days following the announcement of the purchase.

Ultimately, Slack could be a key driver to help Benioff achieve his lofty goal of reaching $60 billion in annual revenue by 2034.

Joe Williams

Joe Williams is a writer-at-large at Protocol. He previously covered enterprise software for Protocol, Bloomberg and Business Insider. Joe can be reached at JoeWilliams@Protocol.com. To share information confidentially, he can also be contacted on a non-work device via Signal (+1-309-265-6120) or JPW53189@protonmail.com.

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