shares of sales force Shares soared 22% on Thursday after the company reported higher second-quarter profits and announced an expanded partnership with an artificial intelligence startup. human.
It was the second-best day on record for stocks, behind August 2020, when the stock rose about 26%.
CEO Marc Benioff and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei joined CNBC to announce Claudeforce’s effort to bring Salesforce to Claude using a plugin built to give sales reps access to critical data through Frontier Labs’ Claude chatbot.
The expansion of AI has fostered optimism and helped make names for software such as: adobe, Palantir, ServiceNow, autodesk and figmaeveryone rallied together. of iShares Expand Technology Software ETF rose about 5%
Software stocks have been hit this year by concerns that generative artificial intelligence could disrupt the software-as-a-service (SaaS) business model.
“This is not SaaSpocalypse,” Benioff said on Wednesday’s earnings call. “We’ve been hearing about this for the past two quarters, dire predictions about the demise of software and how models will eat everything up, and none of that came true for us.”
5-day stock price chart of Salesforce (CRM).
Salesforce had revenue of $11.35 billion, compared to LSEG analysts’ expectations of $11.32 billion. This was an 11% increase compared to the previous year. The software company reported adjusted earnings per share of $5.90, beating expectations of $3.27 per share.
Net income increased 87% year-over-year to $3.53 billion, or $4.29 per share, compared to $1.89 billion, or $1.96 per share, in the same period last year.
The company also noted a $2.6 billion return from its strategic investment in Anthropic, which has now increased its valuation to $965 billion ahead of its much-anticipated initial public offering.
Correction: This article has been corrected to reflect that Salesforce’s CEO is Marc Benioff. A previous version misspelled his name.
