The last time we wrote about software developer Salesforce ($CRM), the company had never seen its stock sit so high on Wall Street. But that was for last year's fourth-quarter earnings, that article was written months ago, and this week is the first-quarter 2020 earnings. The stock is no longer at that all-time high, but that doesn't mean Salesforce isn't doing incredibly well, because it still is. Despite job listings being way down, everything in the data suggests a company that is doing just fine and is relatively COVID-proof.
The Zacks Consensus Estimate for Salesforce's first-quarter earnings is $0.69 per share. The report will be happening Thursday, May 28.
Salesforce job postings look like the start of a roller coaster; from early February to early April it slowly ratcheted up, and then ever since it's been on a gigantic rush downwards. The first four months of 2020 saw a 30% rise in job openings, while the last several weeks have fallen 55%, under a thousand job postings for the first time in years.
Salesforce has grown incrementally over the years, including 2020. Since the start of the year, the headcount tracked by LinkedIn Employee data has grown by 9%. Additionally, you can see the stock price dipped after we last wrote about Salesforce in February, but not enough to break out the tiny violin, it's done quite well since.
The most remarkable thing we didn't plan on finding was Salesforce's growth in social followers. The company's Twitter following went up 6% this year and cracked half a million followers. Instagram followers increased by 11% (not shown here) as well. But the strangest thing we found was a stretch of days back in March on Facebook that got almost 90,000 people to talk about Salesforce. It seems people online really wanted to know more about the new CEO of India Business, which you can read more about here.
About the Data:
Thinknum tracks companies using the information they post online - jobs, social and web traffic, product sales, and app ratings - and creates data sets that measure factors like hiring, revenue, and foot traffic. Data sets may not be fully comprehensive (they only account for what is available on the web), but they can be used to gauge performance factors like staffing and sales.