-- Salesforce Inc. shares fell as much as 17% in premarket trading after the software maker said sales growth in the current quarter will stall to its slowest in history, fueling concerns about the company’s ability to stay relevant as the industry shifts toward artificial-intelligence tools.Revenue will rise as much as 8% to $9.25 billion in the period ending in July, the San Francisco-based company said Wednesday in a statement.
Salesforce’s Data Cloud, which organizes information for analysis and artificial intelligence, is a major focus for executives and investors. The business unit containing Data Cloud, Mulesoft, and Tableau increased 24% to $1.4 billion. Analysts, on average, expected $1.36 billion.Salesforce recently considered buying Informatica Inc., a maker of data-organization software, underscoring its investment in the product category, before talks fizzled.
Current remaining performance obligation, a measure of contracted sales, increased 10% to $26.4 billion, below estimates. This underperformance may have been due to large deals not closing or headcount among customers remaining stagnant, wrote Anurag Rana, an analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence. The retailer once known for toned models and low-rise jeans just notched $1 billion in sales—its best first quarter in the history of the company. -Salesforce forecast second-quarter profit and revenue below Wall Street estimates on Wednesday due to weak client spending on its cloud and enterprise business products, sending its shares down more than 16% after the bell.