Salesforce may look cheap, but buying before a genuine reacceleration in its results is gambling. x.com
Waterworld Capital
Public Markets Commentary
Salesforce stock is unlikely to do much because the company has little growth, though the business should be fine long term; not a buy. x.com
Salesforce is fully priced, even a little more than worth paying, for roughly 12% annual growth: trailing revenue of $43B is expected to reach $63B by 2030. A lower price would be needed for a long-term position, and it is not a buy-and-forget stock. x.com x.com
Salesforce's poor M&A is literally half the reason its multiple stays low. Slack and Informatica are cited as examples, with Braze raised as a question; AI making Tableau obsolete in a few years would be a separate risk, not itself poor M&A. x.com
Salesforce is no longer cheap enough given how much wallet share core CRM is losing. Organic growth only matches nominal GDP despite a massive increase in agentic spending, and large enterprises increasingly see Salesforce as a data pipe for their own custom agents, an ex-growth business that deserves a low multiple. The Informatica acquisition doubles down on that weak model. Salesforce was too cheap at 12x non-GAAP earnings, but near high-teens it is fair, and terminal risks have not abated. … Show more
Salesforce's only bull case is valuation and buybacks, and its 20% drop over five years happened for a reason. Even at about 18x earnings, down from 39x two years ago per @qualtrim, a PEG ratio of 2 means it is not cheap by any means. @StockMarketNerd notes the share count fell 15% year over year on accelerated buybacks, alongside a raised organic growth guide. x.com x.com
Salesforce, at the forefront of CRM for decades, is far likelier to build an even better product for the AI era than companies are to build their own CRM, making it the favorite SaaS name. The case examines what it would take for Salesforce to compound about 27% a year over the next five years. x.com x.com x.com
Salesforce is a great business, but SaaS names need to reaccelerate in this market and its growth is not enough today. Organic constant-currency growth is about 8–9%, fiscal 2027 free cash flow guidance came in below buy-side expectations, and Agentforce apps grew just 9% year over year, the slowest in years. Private SaaS metrics and Snowflake's latest report make that bar higher. x.com
Salesforce's execution has been abysmal, and the market will never trust Marc Benioff. Fifteen years ago, people hired from Salesforce helped companies scale; the Salesforce people encountered now are genuinely very bad. It might still work, but it is hard to back. x.com
Salesforce's strong free cash flow and healthy balance sheet support its setup as enterprise AI adoption, Agentforce and AI-driven workflow automation advance. Its earnings gap on four times average volume has been followed by a tightening formation. x.com x.com
Salesforce is underweight because it is adding debt for buybacks just as its AI pivot makes growth less certain. It issued $25 billion of senior notes to fund an accelerated buyback, and S&P revised its outlook to negative as leverage nears the 2x downgrade trigger; weak demand forced a 40 basis point concession. Core SaaS growth is slowing to high single digits, and Agentforce plus Data 360, at $2.9 billion ARR, are under 7% of revenue, exposed if AI seat cannibalization outpaces usage credits. … Show more