Salesforce Q2 results meet St forecast; outlook for fiscal up

The shares of Salesforce.com Inc soared on Wall Street on Thursday after it announced results for the second quarter ending 31 July. The revenues were up at $1.63billion while the earnings per share stood at $0.19 after the consensus on non-GAAP earnings of $0.18.

The cloud-based business software company has raised its forecast for the financial year. The stock rebounded on the encouraging financial performance. For the past two years, Salesforce.com Inc met the forecasts or narrowly beat the projections.

The company's encouraging growth in sales volume helped it post better than expected results. Salesforce's CEO Marc Benioff said on earnings' call: "We're well on our way to accomplishing our goal of being the fastest company ever to reach $10 billion in revenues."

The company's stock rose when Dow Jones is reeling under pressure. Though the stock fell about five percent during regular trading as the Wall Street was under pressure, it picked up immediately after the results announcement.

Salesforce's shares were encouragingly up on the Wall Street while other blue chip stocks were either trading lower or flat. Some technology stocks suffered losses after announcing their results.

The intraday session on the Wall Street indicated, Salesforce stock rose over 4.5 percent to $70.85, while Hewlett-Packard Co up 0.4 percent to $27.45 after its results. Intuit Inc shares fell 2.9 percent to $99.90 after the company missing the St forecast.

In last May also, the company beat the Street expectations by $0.02 on earnings of $0.16 and surpassed revenues forecast by $10million by posting $1.51 billion for that quarter.

Company's President Keith Block considered the quarter exceptional for the organization as it exceeded the performance across several countries.

The company reported deferred revenue growth of 29 percent to $3.03 billion while unbilled deferred revenue growth of 24% at $6.2billion. The strength in sales pipeline was the major factor to up guidance for the full financial year, said company's CFO Mark Hawkins.

The shares on Wall Street rose at a time when Dow Jones was witnessing its worst day of the year to date. Salesforce's shares were up 2.79 percent.
Salesforce's stock touched its all-time high in April following its earnings report. The company has been performing very well during the past few quarters.

Analysts attribute the reasons for the retreating of the share price to wait and watch mode of investors as they're trying to determine the fair value of the stock, which has been on the growth trajectory for some time.