Salesforce.com Posts Small Q2 Loss, But Raises 2011 Outlook
CRM-as-a-service provider Salesforce.com‘s second quarter earnings statement for FY 2012 was kind of a good news/bad news situation. The good news: The company has more than 104,000 paying customers, and raised its outlook to between $2.22 billion and $2.23 billion. The bad news: It posted a small net loss for the quarter.
According to Salesforce’s earnings statement, the cloud company turned a $4.3 million net loss in the second quarter, which comes out to 3 cents a share. Regardless, the overall $546 million in revenue is a 38 percent year-over-year boost. As usual, the full earnings statement contains all the nitty-gritty.
As for those customer figures, we know Salesforce added 6,300 in the second quarter, bringing it to the aforementioned 104,000 milestone. But Salesforce said this will be the last time it shares customer numbers on a quarterly basis, so we’ll have to rely on hypothetical separate announcements from here on out.
Salesforce CEO Mark Benioff was in an upbeat mood on the earnings call, saying that in addition to its core CRM business, more than 150,000 companies are using the Salesforce Chatter social platform. And what’s more, Salesforce is hiring, with an expected 30 percent increase in distribution coming over the remainder of the year.
Benioff also hyped the recent closing of an eight-figure deal with the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) as a revenue-builder. And on that note, Salesforce said it expects to announce a “large telecommunications company” as a customer at the upcoming DreamForce ’11 conference in San Francisco.
Bundled with its Q1 earnings, Salesforce.com has had a pretty decent start to the year. TalkinCloud will be at the DreamForce conference at the end of August, so keep watching for updates and insights into Salesforce’s overall strategy.
