Salesforce Seeks to Expand in Europe With New Office, Grant

Salesforce CRM recently announced that it is stepping up its expansive efforts in Ireland with a new building — the Salesforce Tower in Dublin — a 430,000 square foot campus of four interconnected buildings.  The company also stated its intentions to open 1,500 employment opportunities locally over the course of the next five years.

Further, highlighting Salesforce’s efforts in Ireland was the $1 million grant to Educate Together, announced by Salesforce.org — the company’s philanthropic subsidiary. This grant will be used to build and run 84 primary and 13 second-level schools in Ireland, providing education to more than 28,000 students. Notably, this is said to be Salesforce’s largest European grant to date.

The announcements were made with the Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar, in the presence of about 1,000 employees.

Salesforce currently has more than 1,400 employees in Dublin. The addition of 1,500 employees will be across all functions including engineering, customer support, sales and business services.

Miguel Milano, President, International, Salesforce, said, "Europe is Salesforce's fastest growing region, and Ireland has been a significant part of our success. We are excited to be announcing our continued commitment with this investment in Dublin as we grow our team in the coming years."

Salesforce’s expansive efforts in Europe are long documented. Over the past few years, it has invested in several start-ups, through both acquisitions and partnerships. In Europe, the company opened its first data center in the U.K. in August 2014.

In 2015, Salesforce opened two more datacenters, one each in France and Germany, which helped it reach local small and medium businesses as well as government agencies. In the same year, the company’s investment arm, Salesforce Ventures, invested $100 million specifically in European start-ups.

Last April, Salesforce announced an investment of $2.2 billion in its French business over the next five years. Further, in June last year, it announced its plan to spend $2.5 billion to boost sales in the U.K. — its largest European market — over the next five years.

The main intent behind the company’s endeavours in Ireland (Europe in general) might be the fact that its home market in the United States has hit a saturation point leading to slower growth of its cloud software.  On the other hand, the company continues to win customers in the international market, which in turn, is helping it deliver strong growth internationally.

We believe expansion in Europe would enable the company to diversify its international revenues, going forward.

Notably, in the last reported quarter, revenue from Americas grew 25% while Europe grew 31% and Asia Pacific grew 26%. However, Americas still accounts for 72% of total revenue while Europe and Asia Pacific account for 18% and 10%, respectively. Therefore, there is still a lot of room for Salesforce’s growth in the international quarters.

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Zacks Rank & Other Stocks to Consider

Salesforce currently carries a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy).

Some other top-ranked stocks in the broader Computer and Technology sector are Synopsys, Inc. SNPS, Twitter, Inc. TWTR and Marvell Technology Group Ltd. MRVL, each sporting a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy). You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank stocks here.

Long-term earnings growth rate for Synopsys, Twitter and Marvell is projected to be 10%, 22.05% and 9.38%, respectively.

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