Salesforce Becomes Third-Largest Provider of Enterprise Software - Third Quarter Impresses Across the Board

Salesforce (CRM) provides comprehensive cloud solutions for customer acquisition, retention, sales, service and marketing and, according to the IDC Software Tracker, is the market leader in customer relationship management for the 10th year in a row. In terms of revenue, Salesforce is the third-largest provider of business software and the leader in enterprise applications and AI-based CRM. CEO Marc Benioff wants to lead customers into a "new era of incredible productivity" by integrating CRM, data and AI into a single platform. With Customer 360, a complete suite of individual product categories is offered, giving a company's individual teams a shared view of each customer at all times. Powered by trusted AI and data, Salesforce's Sales Cloud delivers millions of AI-powered sales recommendations and insights for organizations of all sizes and industries, helping them seal deals and grow revenue faster. Also during Cyber Week, according to Salesforce data analysis on over 1.5 million buyers via the Customer 360 platform, there was a global increase of 6% to $298 billion in digital sales, which was a new record. $51 billion of this is said to have already been supported by AI. The Commerce Cloud alone facilitated almost 50 million orders and Einstein delivered a full 49 billion product recommendations. 3.7 billion customer inquiries were processed and resolved via the Service Cloud. Salesforce aims to increase the addressable market by 13 % p. a. to over $290 billion by 2026.

17% of the Fortune 100 use the Einstein Copilot - Data Cloud with 1,000 new customers
In September, Einstein Copilot, a new conversational AI assistant, was introduced as the next generation of Einstein and is intended to be available for every Salesforce application. Among other things, the assistant can summarize video calls, provide personalized answers to customer questions and generate emails for marketing campaigns, taking into account all available and relevant data. 17% of Fortune 100 companies are already using Einstein Copilot in this short time. The new Einstein 1 platform can be used to link any data in order to obtain better customer profiles and create completely new CRM applications. This basically extends and combines the advantages of Einstein AI and the Data Cloud, which in the last quarter recorded a whole 140% more data records (6.4 trillion) and also triggered 220% more activations (1.4 trillion) than in the same quarter of the previous year. There were 1,000 new customers in the Data Cloud alone in the last quarter. With a trusted platform and extensive customer base, Salesforce believes it is in a good position to differentiate its architecture from other major next-generation voice models. In addition to the AI revolution, there is also a trust revolution, according to Benioff.

80% increase in contracts over $1 million
In the third quarter, revenue increased by 11% to $8.72 billion (consensus: $7.95 billion). At $2.11 per share (consensus: $1.88), net profit was also well above analysts' estimates. Contracts worth more than $1 million increased by 80% as customers increasingly want to buy more of the products on offer. Nine out of the ten largest deals comprised six or more cloud modules. The remaining performance obligations increased by 21% to $48.3 billion. Job cuts continue to have a positive impact. In January, the workforce was reduced by 10 % and more than 3,000 additional employees followed in September. The operating margin climbed by 850 basis points to 31.2%. With a free cash flow of $1.4 billion, there was a tenfold increase. Revenues of between $9.18 billion and $9.23 billion (consensus: $8.4 billion) are expected for the fourth quarter. Net profit is expected to be $2.25-2.26 per share (consensus: $1.98). On an annual basis, management has raised the sales outlook from the previous $34.7-34.8 billion to $34.75-34.8 billion at the lower end of the range. This is expected to result in growth of around 11%. The target is $50 billion by 2026. The profit forecast has also been revised upwards from $8.04-8.06 to $8.18-8.19 per share and the operating margin target to 30.5%.

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