Will Salesforce.com’s Volatility Continue into Next Year?
salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM) is a leader in customer relationship management (CRM) enterprise software, and it has built out a suite of solutions for marketing, analytics, and customer service. The company has combined strong organic growth with aggressive acquisitive behavior to deliver sustained rapid top-line expansion. The company reported sales of nearly $16 billion over the trailing 12 months, and its market capitalization of $139 billion places it in the same league as software giants Oracle, SAP, and Adobe.
Salesforce's stock started trading under $4 in 2004, and it has charged upward during the extended bull period that began in 2009, hitting $160 in September 2018. Since then, the story has been more muddled, and it sank as low $122 in November 2018. Shares were strong to start 2019 and rose as high as $167 in March, but it has bounced back and forth between the $145 to $160 range for most of the year. The stock's three-year beta is 1.23, indicating higher-than-average volatility, but the past 15 months have seen even wider price deviations.
Today, investors are bullish about Salesforce's position as a leader in the cloud market. A McKinsey study estimated that while 95% of enterprises have moved their computing to the cloud, they only migrated 20% of their workload. That means that vendors serving cloud applications still have tremendous opportunities to further monetize the future transition of data.
Source Fool.com
