Salesforce delivers strong Q2, ups outlook for fiscal 2022
Salesforce handily topped expectations for the second quarter as the company begins to integrate the acquisition of Slack and prep for its Dreamforce conference.
The company reported second quarter earnings of 56 cents a share on revenue of $6.34 billion, up 23% from a year ago. Non-GAAP earnings were $1.48 a share. For Salesforce, the quarter marked the first one topping $6 billion in revenue.
Wall Street was expecting Salesforce to report fiscal second quarter revenue of $6.24 billion with non-GAAP earnings of 92 cents a share. By product line, Salesforce's "other" category that includes MuleSoft and Tableau was its biggest revenue line. That fact highlights how Salesforce has been able to sell its products more as an integrated stack.
- Sales Cloud revenue was up 15% from a year ago to $1.5 billion in the second quarter.
- Service Cloud second quarter revenue was $1.6 billion, up 23% from a year ago.
- Platform and other including MuleSoft and Tableau had second quarter sales of $1.9 billion, up 24%.
- And marketing and commerce revenue of $1 billion was up 28% from the second quarter a year ago.
Developments this quarter include:
- Salesforce starts Slack integrations with Slack-First Customer 360 with more on deck
- Salesforce updates Health Cloud, highlights surround electronic health record strategy
- 'Digital HQ' emerges from Salesforce's $27.7 billion Slack acquisition
- Tableau's latest update aims for AI enhanced augmented analytics, broader access to data
- Salesforce, AWS expand partnership with pre-built apps, multiple native integrations for developers
- Salesforce announces more tools for low-code development
As for the outlook, Salesforce projected third quarter revenue of $6.78 billion to $6.79 billion, up 25% from a year ago, and non-GAAP earnings between 91 cents a share and 92 cents a share.
CEO Marc Benioff said the company continues to benefit from digital transformation spending and the ability to sell across its clouds, Tableau, MuleSoft and the newly acquired Slack.
On a conference call with analysts, Salesforce co-president Bret Taylor said Tableau was in 9 of the company's top 10 deals in the second quarter and MuleSoft was in 8 of the top 10.
Taylor said:
The real power of Salesforce platform is bringing all of these capabilities together into a Customer 360, a single source of truth for your customers. Our industry strategy is enabling our customers to get started with an end-to-end Customer 360 faster than ever before, tailored to the specific needs of every industry. Our Industry Cloud saw 58% year-over-year growth in annual recurring revenue. We had especially strong performance in the public sector, in our Health Cloud business and financial services. In fact, 4 of our top 10 deals in the second quarter came from the public sector.
Taylor added that Slack can show similar bundling power. He said: "Slack comes up in every single one of my customer conversations."
For fiscal 2022, Salesforce is projecting revenue of $26.2 billion to $26.3 billion with non-GAAP earnings of $4.36 a share to $4.38 a share. Wall Street was expecting fiscal 2022 earnings of $3.82 a share. The company is projecting operating margins of 1.8% for fiscal 2022 and 18.5% on a non-GAAP basis. The guidance was above previous projections.