Polen Capital, an investment management company, released its “Polen Focus Growth Strategy” first-quarter 2023 investor letter. A copy of the same can be downloaded here. The fund returned 14.06% net in the first quarter compared to a 14.37% return for the Russell 1000 Growth Index and a 7.50% return for the S&P 500 Index. The first quarter was different from 2022. Technology, communications services, and consumer discretionary sectors were strong, while financials, energy, healthcare, and utilities sectors all had negative returns, which was opposite to the sectors’ performance last year. In addition, please check the fund’s top five holdings to know its best picks in 2023.
Polen Focus Growth Strategy highlighted stocks like Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM) in the first quarter 2023 investor letter. Headquartered in San Francisco, California, Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM) designs and develops cloud-based software for customer relationship management. On April 25, 2023, Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM) stock closed at $190.67 per share. One-month return of Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM) was -3.04%, and its shares gained 9.15% of their value over the last 52 weeks. Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM) has a market capitalization of $190.67 billion.
Polen Focus Growth Strategy made the following comment about Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM) in its Q1 2023 investor letter:
“Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM) shares increased over 50% in the quarter, despite the slowing macroeconomy, putting some pressure on the company’s revenue growth in the short term. We believe the strong share price performance was due to resilient revenue growth, despite the tough selling environment in recent quarters, and management’s actions to improve governance structures and streamline operations, including reducing headcount and overall operating expenses as a percentage of sales on a go-forward basis.
While we have long admired Salesforce’s market leading enterprise software across several cloud offerings, we have also believed that the company’s cost structure was bloated. We applaud management’s decision to become a more streamlined and profitable business without sacrificing product development efforts, especially as we also continue to expect healthy revenue growth over the coming five years. The investment case for companies that have solid revenue growth along with disciplined expense management and strong capital allocation can often be, in our experience, a strong combination. And, if it also happens to include accelerating revenue growth and a highly attractive valuation, it can provide for unusually strong shareholder returns. We believe Amazon (see later below) and other companies in the Portfolio are similarly positioned.”
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Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM) is in 11th position on our list of 30 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. As per our database, 117 hedge fund portfolios held Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM) at the end of the fourth quarter which was 117 in the previous quarter.
We discussed Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM) in another article and shared the list of largest cloud providers by revenue. In addition, please check out our hedge fund investor letters Q1 2023 page for more investor letters from hedge funds and other leading investors.
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Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.
