Salesforce.com CEO sells 25,000 Shares in Transaction on Tuesday

In a transaction on Tuesday, 25,000 shares of stock were sold by Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff. The average selling price for the stock was $72.17 and the total value was $1.8 million. The chief executive officer now directly owns 37,662,500 shares in the company. The valuation after the transaction remains at approximately $2,718,100,000.

The news about the transaction surfaced in a filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission. Trading on Wednesday saw decline of 1.85% in performance of shares of Salesforce.com, hitting $70.16. A trading volume of 9,728,295 shares was seen in the stock.

Earnings data of Salesforce.com was last released on Wednesday, May 20. According to reports from the CRM provider, earnings per share were $0.16 for the quarter. It surpassed the analysts’ consensus estimate of $0.14 by $0.02.

The consensus estimate for the company’s revenue was $1.50 billion, but the company recorded $1.51 billion for the quarter, thereby beating the estimate.

Despite strong revenue growth over the past few years, the company has failed to earn consistent profits and the reason behind it was margins waver on higher spending. For example, on recruiting sales personnel whose role is important in expanding deferred revenue.

“I think what investors will be very enthusiastic about tomorrow is how much margin upside there was”, said FBR Capital Markets analyst Samad Samana.

Salesforce's Service Cloud went ahead of SAP to earn the position of the market share leader in customer service and support, said Chief Executive Marc Benioff on a conference call.

However, Chief Executive Marc Benioff has to say that valuation of Salesforce has been done richly and it is unlikely to be bought.

Microsoft Corp, Oracle Corp and SAP are considered as the potential acquirers of Salesforce. The company is valued at about $45.6 billion.