Argus Reiterates Buy On Salesforce Following Strong Earnings

Argus analyst, Joseph Bonner, has reiterated Buy rating on the shares of salesforce.com, inc.

. The brokerage also maintained its price target of $95 on the shares of the company. The move comes after the company delivered strong financial numbers for the first quarter. The analysts pointed out that salesforce.com is delivering the promise made by its CEO, Marc Benioff, that it would deliver Q-o-Q top line growth along with improved profitability as demonstrated by its first quarter results. Argus said that in its view, the company is well-placed to take advantage of the secular trends towards software-as-a-serve cloud solutions, data analytics, and platform software services. The brokerage also thinks that it was away from higher-cost on-premise software. Bonner also sees the company gaining market share while rapidly innovating its enterprise cloud CROM space. The analyst boosted his adjusted earnings expectations by a penny to $1.03 a share for the fiscal year 2017 and maintained its fiscal year 2018 outlook of $1.34 a share. The analyst commented, "We see Salesforce gaining traction in enterprise applications software, beginning with its customer relationship management "Sales Cloud" offering and extending to its "Marketing Cloud," "Analytics Cloud," and "Community Cloud" products. Tech industry trackers such as Gartner have consistently named Salesforce a leader in cloud CRM; Salesforce may now be extending that lead as growth in its largest segment, Sales Cloud, reaccelerated in 1Q17. Salesforce.com has positioned itself at the center of converging enterprise cloud, analytics social networking, and mobile technologies, and is well positioned to exploit the secular trend toward software-as-a-service cloud solutions, and away from higher-cost on-premise software. The company is rapidly innovating, taking market share in its core markets, and expanding internationally." Argus indicated that valuations remained high for this early-stage technology company reflecting its strong growth prospects. However, the analyst noted that the stock's premium to peers, based on forward enterprise value/EBITDA, is about in line with the historical average premium over the last two years. The stock traded 0.18 percent down on Friday.