Salesforce Gains on Strong Guidance as Slack Adds to Momentum By Investing.com

By Dhirendra Tripathi

Investing.com – Salesforce (NYSE:) stock traded 3.7% higher in premarket Wednesday after the company raised its forecast, basing its optimism on the evolving hybrid work environment generating demand for its customer relations software.

The company is also pinning its outlook on the business Slack is generating at the company after it acquired the workspace app last year in a near $28 billion deal.

“Slack continues to exceed our expectations that I think is benefiting not only from the trend towards this new way of working… It’s also benefiting being a part of our Customer 360 portfolio,” Reuters quoted Co-CEO Bret Taylor, as saying. Customer 360 is Salesforce’s complete suit of applications geared at powering clients’ sales, services, analytics, and other functions.

The company is now projecting annual sales to be $32 billion-$32.1 billion in the current year after revenue grew 25% to cross $26 billion in the latest financial year. Margins are also seen higher, growing to 20% on adjusted basis, from 18.7%.

rose 26% to $7.33 billion on strong demand for its cloud-based software, a business further boosted in times of supply chain constraints and digitization.

All geographies grew, with Europe, the second biggest market, growing the most by 37%.

Remaining performance obligation, an indicator of future revenue streams, came in at around $44 billion at the end of January, up 21%.

Adjusted profit per share was 84 cents, and like sales, ahead of estimates.

Revenue in the current quarter is seen at around $7.38 billion with adjusted EPS estimate to be 93 cents-94 cents.