Shares of salesforce.com, inc. (NYSE:CRM) are up 7.52% to 181.94 a share. The number is an all time high for the CRM company. Shares are rising as a result (of what investors viewed) stronger than expected Q4 earnings. Salesforce.com, inc. (NYSE:CRM) reported Q4 results that beat across all metrics. Total deferred revs were $1.86bn (+35% y/y); billings were $1.41bn (+28% y/y). Excl. $125mn benefits from annual billing and large multi-year contract, and $30mn early renewal, normalized DR and billings grew 39% and 45% respectively. Adjusted billings growth calculation will likely be subject to much debate and no method can be perfect analysts at BAML state.
Analysts at BAML have upgraded the CRM company and have placed a price target of $200. They note that cloud CRM market opportunity larger than on-premise Off balance sheet backlog increased to $3.5bn, up +59% y/y, growing even faster than total DR on BS. This is due to increasing mix of longer-term contracts from enterprise customers, which could also lead to lower attrition rates over time and higher operating leverage.
Two thirds of the salesforce.com, inc. (NYSE:CRM) market is still on-premise and the majority of revs are from maintenance. As an increasing portion of the market shifts to the cloud, BAML estimates that the revenue opportunity for cloud CRM market will be significantly expanded as subscription rev is more than 2x of maintenance.
Gartner forecasts that 75% of existing customer support systems will be upgraded to Cloud solutions by 2016. BAML has raised their FY14 revenue estimate to $3.85bn from $3.82bn.
BAML’s “proprietary analysis” suggests CRM could sustain high growth (30%+) for 4-5 years on compounded basis if not every year. They estimate salesforce.com, inc. (NYSE:CRM)’s TAM could reach $30bn by 2016E (21% CAGR), and revs could reach $8.9bn by 2016E (30% CAGR).
BAML believes that salesforce.com, inc. (NYSE:CRM) can have upside if it maintains 30%+ rev and adj. billings growth (although value investors may be skeptical of such assumptions). They believe Mktg Cloud and Big Data Analytics each opens up multi-bn $ TAM and could help CRM sustain high growth for longer than appreciated by the street. BAML’s new to $228 price target is based on 8.6x EV/Recurring revs in their subscriber analysis and rolling forward subs to FY15.
