Salesforce (NYSE:CRM) Given “Sector Perform” Rating at Royal Bank Of Canada

Salesforce (NYSE:CRM)‘s stock had its “sector perform” rating restated by analysts at Royal Bank Of Canada in a research note issued on Thursday, Benzinga reports. They currently have a $250.00 price target on the CRM provider’s stock. Royal Bank Of Canada’s price target suggests a potential upside of 3.00% from the stock’s current price.

Several other brokerages have also issued reports on CRM. Erste Group Bank raised Salesforce from a “hold” rating to a “buy” rating in a research note on Wednesday, August 5th. Wolfe Research upgraded Salesforce from a “hold” rating to a “strong-buy” rating in a research report on Thursday, August 27th. KeyCorp lowered Salesforce from an “overweight” rating to a “sector weight” rating in a research note on Wednesday, July 8th. Weiss Ratings raised shares of Salesforce from a “sell (d+)” rating to a “hold (c-)” rating in a research note on Wednesday, August 12th. Finally, Wedbush started coverage on shares of Salesforce in a research report on Wednesday, July 1st. They issued an “outperform” rating on the stock. Three research analysts have rated the stock with a Strong Buy rating, twenty-eight have issued a Buy rating, fourteen have given a Hold rating and three have issued a Sell rating to the stock. According to MarketBeat.com, the company has an average rating of “Moderate Buy” and a consensus target price of $272.55.

Salesforce Price Performance

CRM stock opened at $242.73 on Thursday. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 1.02, a current ratio of 0.84 and a quick ratio of 0.84. Salesforce has a one year low of $146.32 and a one year high of $269.11. The stock has a market cap of $199.76 billion, a PE ratio of 22.45, a P/E/G ratio of 1.17 and a beta of 1.20. The firm has a 50 day simple moving average of $205.81 and a two-hundred day simple moving average of $188.56.

Salesforce (NYSE:CRM) last posted its quarterly earnings data on Wednesday, August 26th. The CRM provider reported $5.90 earnings per share for the quarter, beating the consensus estimate of $3.27 by $2.63. Salesforce had a net margin of 21.99% and a return on equity of 24.90%. The firm had revenue of $11.35 billion for the quarter, compared to analysts’ expectations of $11.33 billion. During the same quarter last year, the company posted $2.91 EPS. The business’s quarterly revenue was up 10.8% on a year-over-year basis. Salesforce has set its FY 2027 guidance at 16.670-16.710 EPS and its Q3 2027 guidance at 3.420-3.440 EPS. On average, analysts predict that Salesforce will post 12.83 EPS for the current fiscal year.

Insider Activity

In other news, Director Craig Conway sold 4,500 shares of the company’s stock in a transaction dated Friday, September 4th. The shares were sold at an average price of $260.61, for a total transaction of $1,172,745.00. Following the completion of the transaction, the director directly owned 5,437 shares of the company’s stock, valued at approximately $1,416,936.57. This represents a 45.29% decrease in their ownership of the stock. The sale was disclosed in a legal filing with the SEC, which is accessible through this hyperlink. Insiders own 3.50% of the company’s stock.

Institutional Trading of Salesforce

A number of institutional investors and hedge funds have recently added to or reduced their stakes in CRM. BlackRock Inc. purchased a new stake in Salesforce in the second quarter worth about $11,396,844,000. Bank of America Corp DE bought a new position in shares of Salesforce during the second quarter valued at approximately $1,914,086,000. Norges Bank purchased a new position in shares of Salesforce during the fourth quarter valued at approximately $3,182,951,000. Arrowstreet Capital Limited Partnership lifted its holdings in shares of Salesforce by 130.2% during the first quarter. Arrowstreet Capital Limited Partnership now owns 12,659,217 shares of the CRM provider’s stock valued at $2,363,096,000 after purchasing an additional 7,160,302 shares during the last quarter. Finally, Legal & General Group Plc bought a new stake in shares of Salesforce in the 2nd quarter worth approximately $927,332,000. Hedge funds and other institutional investors own 80.43% of the company’s stock.

Key Headlines Impacting Salesforce

Here are the key news stories impacting Salesforce this week:

• Positive Sentiment: Salesforce projected fiscal 2030 revenue of more than $63 billion, above Wall Street expectations. The outlook suggests that AI, data products and Agentforce can reaccelerate growth and counter fears that generative AI could disrupt Salesforce’s core software business. Salesforce issues revenue target of over $63 billion for fiscal 2030
• Positive Sentiment: Salesforce introduced AIforce, a new interface layer intended to let users interact with CRM data and applications through AI agents rather than traditional software navigation. It also unveiled Koa, a CRM reasoning model developed with NVIDIA, and expanded integrations involving Anthropic, Slack, Amazon and OpenAI. These initiatives could increase premium-product adoption and customer spending. Salesforce unleashes AIForce to enable headless SaaS
• Positive Sentiment: Analysts became more constructive: BMO raised its target to $285, Canaccord lifted its target to $300 with a Buy rating, Cantor Fitzgerald reiterated Overweight at $300, and Mizuho raised its target to $280. The upgrades reinforce confidence in Salesforce’s AI monetization prospects.
• Positive Sentiment: Investors are also highlighting Salesforce’s $25 billion share-repurchase authorization, while unusually heavy call-option activity indicates increased speculative bullish interest.
• Neutral Sentiment: A partnership with Snap will bring Salesforce and other enterprise tools to Snap’s augmented-reality glasses. The deal could broaden Salesforce’s distribution, although its near-term financial impact is unclear. Snap targets enterprises with Salesforce, Nvidia AI tools
• Negative Sentiment: A widespread service outage during Dreamforce caused delays and intermittent access problems for customers, creating reputational and execution concerns at a closely watched investor event. Salesforce Service Outages Strike on Day 2 of Dreamforce Conference

About Salesforce

Salesforce, Inc is a cloud-based software company that provides customer relationship management (CRM) technology and related enterprise applications. Its platform helps organizations manage sales, customer service, marketing, commerce, data analytics and business operations through subscription-based software and cloud services.

The company’s product portfolio includes Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud, Data Cloud and the Salesforce Platform. Salesforce also offers Slack for workplace collaboration, Tableau for data visualization and analytics, MuleSoft for application integration, and artificial intelligence capabilities, including its Agentforce platform for building and deploying AI agents.

Founded in 1999, Salesforce is headquartered in San Francisco, California, and serves businesses and organizations across a broad range of industries and geographic markets worldwide.