Salesforce posted a mixed third quarter and fourth quarter outlook as revenue was up 8% from a year ago. The company saw revenue growth decelerate sequentially across multiple categories.
The company reported third quarter earnings of $1.58 a share on revenue of $9.44 billion. Non-GAAP earnings in the third quarter were $2.41 a share. Salesforce said it took a hit of 17 cents a share due to investment losses.
Wall Street was looking for third quarter non-GAAP earnings of $2.44 a share on revenue of $9.34 billion.
As for the outlook, Salesforce projected fourth quarter sales between $9.9 billion to $10.10 billion compared to estimates of $10.05 billion. Salesforce projected non-GAAP earnings of $2.57 a share to $2.62 a share compared to estimates of $2.65 a share.
For fiscal 2025, Salesforce projected revenue of $37.8 billion to $38 billion.
CEO Marc Benioff said the company is seeing strong interest in its Agentforce effort.
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Salesforce saw sales growth deceleration in integration and analytics (MuleSoft and Tableau) with third quarter revenue growth of 5%. Platform and other (think Slack) saw third quarter revenue growth of 8%, down from 10% in the second quarter.
Here's a look.
Constellation Research analyst Holger Mueller said:
"Cost for subscription and support is down - $70 million or 4.8%. Not sure if Salesforce let go of support people here -- but it maybe an indicator that old on premise instances are more expensive as Salesforce customers have been moving to public cloud. But running all these agents should be a bump up in cost."
