Salesforce Stock Plummets 8.5%: What’s Rattling Investors Today?
Another brutal morning for Salesforce shareholders as the stock tanks—no sugarcoating this selloff.
Earnings miss or guidance panic?
Wall Street's dumping shares faster than a hot NFT project. That 8.5% nosedive suggests someone knows something the rest of us don't.
Cloud giants aren't bulletproof
Even SaaS royalty catches flak when growth stumbles. Remember when 'digital transformation' was supposed to print money forever?
Funny how these 'stable' tech stocks suddenly look riskier than a leveraged crypto long when the numbers don't add up. Maybe those 'boring' balance sheets weren't so boring after all.
Image source: Getty Images.
Another earnings beat for Salesforce, but wait -- there's more
Wall Street's average analyst had expected second-quarter earnings to rise about 8.6% year over year, landing NEAR $2.78 per share. Revenue was targeted at roughly $10.1 billion, reflecting an 8.7% increase. The enterprise software giant exceeded the consensus analyst targets across the board, posting earnings of $2.91 per share on sales of $10.2 billion.
Looking ahead, management set full-year guidance targets just above the current analyst projections. So it was a beat-and-raise performance, but the stock still took a tumble.
Why investors wanted more from Salesforce's AI moves
Salesforce investors were probably looking for stronger guidance targets. After all, CEO Marc Benioff recently said that his company is removing roughly half of its customer support staff in favor of artificial intelligence (AI) tools. Specifically, deploying agentic AI systems to support human customer service specialists can deliver top-notch support outcomes at a faster pace and lower cost.
But this report highlights how the company isn't exactly laying off that redundant support staff. Instead, the workers are being redeployed into sales and marketing operations, where the human touch makes a bigger difference these days. So, if you were hoping for a large cost-cutting effect from Salesforce's agentic AI moves, the reported financials told a different story.
