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's happening: Shares of salesforce.com (CRM -1.10%) were up 11% as of 11:50 a.m. EST Thursday after the cloud-based CRM specialist announced inline fiscal fourth-quarter 2015 results, raised fiscal 2016 revenue guidance, and showed solid growth in its backlog.
Why it's happening: Quarterly revenue climbed 26% year over year to $1.44 billion, which translated to adjusted earnings of $0.14 per diluted share. Both figures were in line with analysts' expectations.
Perhaps most impressive, however, is that Salesforce reported deferred revenue of $3.32 billion, up 32% year over year. Unbilled deferred revenue, which represents business contracted but not yet billed and off the balance sheet, ended the year 27% higher at $5.7 billion. Because Salesforce generally pursues a subscription model for its cloud services, this shows the company is making meaningful progress in securing longer-term deals and serves as a great predictor of its future revenue.
For the current quarter, Salesforce expects revenue of roughly $1.485 billion to $1.505 billion, an increase of 21% to 23% over the same year-ago period. That should result in adjusted earnings per share of $0.13 to $0.14. Analysts had modeled slightly higher earnings of $0.15 per share on sales of $1.50 billion.
For the full fiscal 2016, Salesforce raised its revenue guidance range to $6.475 billion to $6.520 billion, from a prior range of $6.45 billion to $6.50 billion. The new range also includes an expected foreign exchange headwind of $175 million to $200 million. Fiscal 2016 adjusted earnings per share are expected to be $0.67 to $0.69. Wall Street, for its part, was looking for fiscal 2016 earnings and revenue of $0.69 per share and $6.51 billion, respectively.
In the end, this was a solid performance from Salesforce, whose solutions are securing new customers and growing quickly from an enormous base. Given its fourth-quarter results and impressive growth in deferred revenue, it's no surprise the market is bidding up the stock today.
