Salesforce is on track to become a $100 billion company in 3 years, says analyst
Salesforce is down about 5% over the past two weeks, despite reporting a solid beat-and-raise quarter on November 17.
The drop is largely due to Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff's comment during the earnings call, where he said he wanted to double the company within the next three to four years. Investors believe this growth will come in the form of more large acquisitions — a big risk given the potential dilution and disruption to the core business, Cowen & Co. analyst Derrick Wood wrote in a note earlier this week.
But Wood argues that Benioff's vision to turn Salesforce into a $100 billion market cap company within the next three to four years is very plausible, and could be done without going through another binge-buying spree.
Wood believes the growing market share across most of Salesforce's products is one reason for that. He sees Sales Cloud, its largest product, dropping just 1% in market share to 44% in 2020, while Service Cloud, Commerce Cloud, and App Cloud all seeing strong growths in the period. In all, he believes Salesforce will generate ~$17 billion in revenue by 2020, roughly double the $8.375 billion it's expected to hit this year.
But perhaps the bigger reason is that Wood sees the CRM market becoming the single largest enterprise software segment by 2020, and Salesforce continuing to own a large chunk of it. Gartner predicts the CRM market to become a $51.5 billion market by 2020 surpassing the markets for database, operating systems, and ERP.
"Salesforce remains the dominating vendor in the space, much like Oracle in the Database market, SAP in the ERP market and Microsoft in the Operating Systems market," Wood wrote in the note.
"We think CRM is in a position to hit its 'doubling' targets organically without large M&A."
Here's a chart of where he sees the four different enterprise software segments going over the next four years:
Reference: http://www.businessinsider.com/why-salesforce-could-become-a-100-billion-company-in-3-years-2016-11
