Harding Loevner, an asset management company, released its “Global Equity Strategy” first-quarter 2024 investor letter. A copy of the letter can be downloaded here. The fund generated a 6.9% gross of fee return in the first quarter compared to an 8.3% gain for the MSCI All Country World. Despite rising bond yields, the stock market gained throughout the quarter, partly because of continued interest in the potential applications of artificial intelligence. In addition, please check the fund’s top five holdings to know its best picks in 2024.
Harding Loevner Global Equity Strategy highlighted stocks like Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM), in the first quarter 2024 investor letter. Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM) offers Customer Relationship Management (CRM) technology that brings companies and customers together. The one-month return of Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM) was 19.75%, and its shares gained 2.58% of their value over the last 52 weeks. On May 29, 2024, Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM) stock closed at $271.62 per share with a market capitalization of $212.345 billion.
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.”
A customer service team in an office setting using the company’s Customer 360 platform to communicate with customers.
Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM) is in 11th position on our list of 30 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. As per our database, 154 hedge fund portfolios held Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM) at the end of the first quarter which was 131 in the previous quarter.
In another article, we discussed Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM) and shared the list of best Dow stocks to buy according to hedge funds. Vulcan Value Partners commented about Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM) in the first quarter investor letter. In addition, please check out our hedge fund investor letters Q1 2024 page for more investor letters from hedge funds and other leading investors.
If you are looking for an AI stock that is as promising as Microsoft but that trades at less than 5 times its earnings, check out our report about the cheapest AI stock.
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Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.