The tech industry is typically a popular hunting ground for great stock ideas. The combination of new, innovative ideas, high growth, and exciting prospects makes these stocks appealing to investors. What often comes along with these characteristics is volatility and high valuations, so it's best to approach buying these stocks with a long-term holding period in mind.
When considering what stocks to buy that can be held for many years, it's important to find strong business models, competitive advantages, and companies with products its customers can't live without. Here are two great stock ideas to buy right now and hold for the next decade.
1. ServiceNow
ServiceNow (NOW 0.93%) may not be a household name to most investors because it specializes in business software and therefore is not consumer-facing. The company sells software that helps manage all of the operations of a business on one unified platform. So instead of human resources using one system and finance using another, ServiceNow offers a solution for all of a company's departments to work together on one platform.
Because ServiceNow operates on a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model, it has a reliable, recurring revenue stream that scales over time. While revenue growth has been consistently in the double-digit range, net income has been making steady improvement over the past two years. In the first quarter of 2022, ServiceNow reported net income of $75 million. This improved to $150 million in Q1 of 2023 and $347 million in Q1 of 2024.
The bottom-line improvement is partially due to ServiceNow's success in driving business with its largest customers. In Q1 of 2022, ServiceNow had 1,405 customers with $1 million or more in annual contract value (ACV). On average, these customers had an ACV of $3.9 million. Two years later, in Q1 of 2024, there were 1,933 of these customers whose average ACV was $4.6 million.
2. Adobe
Unlike ServiceNow, the average investor has almost certainly engaged with a product from Adobe (ADBE 0.11%). Known in the creative world for its Photoshop and Illustrator software programs, Adobe is also the creator of PDF files, which anyone with a computer has used at some point or another. Other aspects of Adobe's business are less well-known, but its digital media and digital experience segments make up the vast majority of total revenue.
The dominant news story in the world of investing has been artificial intelligence (AI) and who will be the winners and losers if AI becomes ubiquitous in our lives. There's a case to be made that visual-based AI models that can create images based on text prompts could make a product like Adobe's photo editing software, Photoshop, obsolete. Adobe is working hard to ensure that's not the case.
Recently, Adobe debuted its own AI model called Firefly and has been integrating it into more and more products over time. Rather than a replacement for creative output, Adobe sees Firefly as more of an assistant, handling the more mundane aspects of using its products so that creators can free up time to be creative. In the Q1 2024 earnings call, management stated that Firefly had already generated more than $6.5 billion in assets.
It remains to be seen if Adobe can remain at the forefront of creative software as AI becomes more prevalent, but the company is actively staying out in front of this trend so as not to be left behind. So far, the results would indicate that Adobe isn't losing any business. Annual recurring revenue in Q1 of 2024 grew by double digits for all of Adobe's segments, while overall revenue increased by 11% year over year.
