1. Salesforce Inc (NYSE:CRM)
Number of Hedge Fund Investors: 154
Barclays believes Salesforce Inc. (NYSE:CRM) is one of the stocks to offset tech concentration risks.
Mizuho Securities analyst Gregg Moskowitz thinks the company is still “well situated” to help customers in digital transformation. However, the analyst thinks Salesforce Inc. (NYSE:CRM) would do so prioritizing profitable growth. The analyst reiterated his Buy rating on the stock but cut his price target to $300 from $345.
Morgan Stanley analyst Keith Weiss, who has an Overweight rating and a $320 price target on Salesforce Inc. (NYSE:CRM), said that Salesforce’s PEG ratio of 1.2 shows the market is not pricing in operational discipline and earnings growth sustainability.
“We continue to view GenAI as a tailwind for Salesforce, with benefits likely coming in CY25, but at these levels, GenAI represents a call option.”
Salesforce Inc. (NYSE:CRM) is trading at 22x its fiscal 2026 earnings estimate of $10.99, which makes the stock attractively valued given the sector median P/E ratio of 23.85 and Salesforce’s AI growth catalysts. Salesforce Inc.’s (NYSE:CRM) revenue in fiscal 2026 is expected to grow at 9.10% while earnings are forecasted to rise by 11.00%.
Harding Loevner Global Equity Strategy stated the following regarding Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM) in its first quarter 2024 investor letter:
“Leading software companies have the advantage of high switching costs and the ability to incorporate new features into products customers already use. For example, Microsoft has added its Copilot chatbot functionality to everything from search (Bing Chat, recently renamed to just Copilot) to coding (GitHub Copilot) and workplace applications (Copilot for Microsoft 365). Software sold by Microsoft and other companies such as Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM), SAP, and ServiceNow are also already deeply integrated into their customers’ operations and workflow.
As large enterprises search for the right balance, Salesforce’s Data Cloud, a flagship offering, is designed to address a critical issue for them so they can make better use of AI tools. After a hectic buildout over the last few years of “data warehouses” and “data lakes”—two types of repositories for storing and processing data—across the various business units of large companies, many companies are left with what feels like islands of trapped data. Data Cloud solves this by creating a single platform to access and leverage all of an enterprise’s data, eliminating the need to constantly duplicate large amounts of information across different platforms. Users are then able to apply generative-AI technology, such as Salesforce’s Einstein tool, to a more comprehensive dataset, which enables them to better glean customers’ intentions, personalize marketing messages, and automate the processing of customer-service requests. As users build these systems, Einstein’s copiloting functionality helps their programmers work more efficiently so that IT departments with limited budgets and manpower can still develop the necessary tools. Salesforce’s management projects that revenue and earnings will climb about 9% and 45%, respectively, in fiscal 2025, citing the company’s operating leverage and cost discipline. We think these figures are achievable given the renewed focus on profitable growth, and so we added to the stock during the quarter.”
However, Salesforce Inc. (NYSE:CRM) skeptics believe the stock has run too much as its valuation is high. For value-conscious investors the market is indeed teeming with other opportunities. If you are looking for an AI stock that is as promising as Salesforce Inc. (NYSE:CRM) but that trades at less than 5 times its earnings, check out our report about the cheapest AI stock.
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