SpaceX (SPCX) isn’t the only Big Tech stock getting slammed at the moment. The cover-your-eyes year for Salesforce (CRM) investors just keeps getting worse.
The news: Shares of Salesforce are now hovering at three-and-a-half-year lows. The stock is down about 10% over the past five trading sessions.
Year to date, Salesforce is by far the worst performer in the Dow Jones Industrial Average (^DJI) with a 43% decline. Only Nike (NKE) is close, with a 33% plunge.
The analysis: Salesforce co-founder and CEO Marc Benioff has attempted to fight back against the “SaaS apocalypse” narrative that AI models would render software companies obsolete, which has hammered software stocks in recent months, and his in particular.
The results have been mixed at best.
In late May, Salesforce delivered adjusted earnings of $3.88 per share against Wall Street’s expectation of $3.12, helped by an enormous $27 billion spent on stock repurchases, which cut the share count by a whopping 10%. Revenue hit $11.13 billion, up 13% year over year and ahead of the $11.05 billion consensus.
However, the midpoint of Salesforce’s full-year revenue guidance came in at $46.05 billion, just a hair below the $46.12 billion analysts were penciling in at the time. Investors aren’t confident in how AI at Salesforce will translate to big sales and profits, and when.
“It’s easy to say that AI annual recurring [revenue] grew to over $1 billion, but it remains difficult to see it anywhere in the numbers,” Guggenheim analyst John Difucci wrote in a note.
For the current quarter, Benioff called for $11.27 billion to $11.35 billion in revenue against Street expectations at the time of $11.36 billion — again, just a tick light — and in this market, where software stocks are already under the gun, even a whisker of a guidance miss is enough to give the bears something to work with.
Since the earnings report, Salesforce has resumed its often-questioned acquisition strategy — one of paying top dollar for assets that could serve to distract the company and weigh on margins.
On June 15, it disclosed the $3.6 billion acquisition of AI agent play Fin.
“The constructive read is that Salesforce is buying a scaled, AI native service asset with outcome-based pricing and real customer adoption,” Evercore ISI analyst Kirk Materne pointed out in a note. “The more cautious read would be that Salesforce is ‘buying growth’ and paying a premium for an asset where the durability of the growth rate, margins, and model differentiation are still hard to underwrite — we would be more inclined to lean towards the former but expect some debate in the market today and in the coming days.”
