Is NICE Ltd. (NICE) A Smart Long-Term Buy?

ClearBridge Investments, an investment management firm, published its “International Growth EAFE Strategy” third quarter 2021 investor letter – a copy of which can be downloaded here. During the third quarter, the ClearBridge International Growth EAFE Strategy underperformed its MSCI EAFE Index benchmark. The Strategy delivered gains across two of the 10 sectors in which it was invested (out of 11 total), with the health care sector the primary contributor, while the consumer discretionary, communication services, and consumer staples sectors were the largest detractors. You can take a look at the fund’s top 5 holdings to have an idea about their best picks for 2021.

ClearBridge International Growth EAFE Strategy, in its Q3 2021 investor letter, mentioned NICE Ltd. (NASDAQ: NICE) and discussed its stance on the firm. NICE Ltd. is a Ra’anana, Israel-based software solutions provider with an $18 billion market capitalization. NICE delivered a -8.52% return since the beginning of the year, while its 12-month returns are up by 1.40%. The stock closed at $277.74 per share on January 07, 2022.

Here is what ClearBridge International Growth EAFE Strategy has to say about NICE Ltd.  in its Q3 2021 investor letter:

“In the IT sector, we added to our exposure during the quarter with the purchase of NICE, an Israeli-based enterprise software company and leader in the cloud-based contact center as a service market. NICE is a very profitable, reasonably priced stock with underappreciated cloud assets. Its omnichannel customer contact center software is considered best-in-class and we expect sustained high growth rates in this business as customer service contact centers are still in the early innings of cloud migrations. Cloud adoption has increased in priority for enterprises post COVID-19, given the need for better customer engagement across phone, text, social media and websites.”

Based on our calculations, NICE Ltd. (NASDAQ: NICE) was not able to clinch a spot in our list of the 30 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. NICE was in 27 hedge fund portfolios at the end of the third quarter of 2021, compared to 22 funds in the previous quarter. NICE Ltd. (NASDAQ: NICE) delivered a 5.00% return in the past 3 months.

In March 2021, we also shared another hedge fund’s views on NICE in another article. You can find more than 100 investor letters from hedge funds and prominent investors on our hedge fund investor letters 2021 Q3 page.

Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.