Although we don't believe in timing the market or panicking over market movements, we do like to keep an eye on big changes -- just in case they're material to our investing thesis.
What: Shares of salesforce.com (CRM -0.18%) set a new all-time high after rising more than 14% during Friday's trading following the cloud-based CRM solution specialist's release of better-than-expected fiscal 2014 second-quarter results.
So what: Quarterly revenue rose 31% year over year to $957 million, while GAAP earnings came in at $0.12 per share, benefiting from a $129 million partial release of the company's tax valuation allowance. Meanwhile, non-GAAP earnings came in at $0.09 per share. For reference, analysts were only expecting earnings of $0.07 per share on sales of $939 million.
Now what: Salesforce also initiated third-quarter revenue guidance of between $1.050 billion and $1.055 billion, and raised its full-year fiscal 2014 revenue guidance to a range from $4 billion to $4.025 billion. Analysts, by contrast, were looking for average third-quarter revenue of $1.04 billion and full-year sales of $3.99 billion.
Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff chimed in to say, "Salesforce.com continues to be the fastest growing software company of its size with year-over-year growth of more than 30% in revenue, deferred revenue, and operating cash flow. I'm delighted to announce that just four years after delivering our first $1 billion revenue year, we are now poised to deliver our first $1 billion revenue quarter in the third quarter of fiscal 2014."
To be sure, investors can't help but be pleased with this continued strong growth. As long as the cloud-based company's momentum holds, even near all-time highs there doesn't seem to be much to slow its rise going forward.
