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If You Invested $1000 in Salesforce.com a Decade Ago, This is How Much It'd Be Worth Now

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How much a stock's price changes over time is a significant driver for most investors. Not only can price performance impact your portfolio, but it can help you compare investment results across sectors and industries as well.

Another thing that can drive investing is the fear of missing out, or FOMO. This particularly applies to tech giants and popular consumer-facing stocks.

What if you'd invested in Salesforce.com (CRM - Free Report) ten years ago? It may not have been easy to hold on to CRM for all that time, but if you did, how much would your investment be worth today?

Salesforce.com's Business In-Depth

With that in mind, let's take a look at Salesforce.com's main business drivers.

Salesforce is the leading provider of on-demand Customer Relationship Management (CRM - Free Report) software, which enables organizations to better manage critical operations, such as sales force automation, customer service and support, marketing automation, document management, analytics and custom application development.

Headquartered in San Francisco, Salesforce, Inc. was founded in 1999. Over the course of two and a half decades, the company has established itself as the world's leading CRM vendor with a market share of nearly 20%, according to the reports of Gartner, a global research and advisory firm. Its nearest rival, SAP is way behind at a market share of around 8%.  About 90% of the Fortune 100 companies uses at least one Salesforce software.

The company has leveraged its expertise in on-demand software to increase the scale of operations. It also offers a technology platform for customers and developers to build and run business applications.

Salesforce helps companies of every size and industry to connect with their customers in new ways through existing and emerging technologies including cloud, mobile, social, IoT and artificial intelligence (AI).

Rapid digital transformation and the company’s sustained focus on aligning products with customer needs are driving the top line. Salesforce’s annual revenues have sextupled from $5.4 billion in fiscal 2015 to $34.9 billion in fiscal 2024.

There are two main revenue streams — Subscription and Support and Professional Services & Other.

Subscription revenues comprise subscription fees from customers, accessing the company’s enterprise cloud computing services (Cloud Services), software licenses and subscription fees recognized from customers for additional support. This segment accounted for more than 93% of Salesforce’s fiscal 2024 revenues.

Professional Services & Other revenues consist of fees that the company derives from consulting and implementation services and training. This segment accounted for the remaining 7% of Salesforce’s fiscal 2024 revenues.

Bottom Line

Putting together a successful investment portfolio takes a combination of research, patience, and a little bit of risk. For Salesforce.com, if you bought shares a decade ago, you're likely feeling really good about your investment today.

A $1000 investment made in September 2014 would be worth $4,901.47, or a gain of 390.15%, as of September 26, 2024, according to our calculations. This return excludes dividends but includes price appreciation.

The S&P 500 rose 191.06% and the price of gold increased 109.33% over the same time frame in comparison.

Analysts are forecasting more upside for CRM too.

Salesforce is benefiting from a robust demand environment as customers are undergoing a major digital transformation. Its sustained focus on aligning products with customer needs is driving the top line. Continued deal wins in the international market are another growth driver. The buyout of Slack has positioned it as a leader in enterprise team collaboration and improved its competitive standing versus Microsoft Teams. Salesforce’s strategy of continuous expansion of generative AI offerings will help it tap the growing opportunities in the space. Our estimates suggest that Salesforce revenues are expected to witness a CAGR of 8.6% through fiscal 2025-2027. However, stiff competition and unfavorable currency fluctuations are concerns. Softening IT spending amid ongoing macroeconomic uncertainties might hurt its growth prospects.

Shares have gained 5.87% over the past four weeks and there have been 16 higher earnings estimate revisions for fiscal 2024 compared to none lower. The consensus estimate has moved up as well.

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