CRM
Salesforce, Inc.
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CRM

Veeva has rallied a lot from the depths of SaaS-pocalypse and it doesn’t seem super cheap on trailing earnings. I think it might still be positioned for a multi year run. I think it’s a very high quality business with a defensible moat and I think the revenue growth might be about to accelerate rather than decelerate. The multiple is fairly high and I don’t expect a lot of expansion there, but I think it might hold a high multiple and earnings growth might be very good in the next several years. Veeva makes software that handles several use cases for biotech and pharma. They handle 4 key tasks - running the clinical trial, handling regulator submission and correspondence, handling safety data, and handling commercial and marketing content. Whenever I hear these AI guys (Dario, Sam Altman, etc) talk about the benefits of AI, it seems like the first thing they talk about is the benefits to new drug discovery and medical innovation. This probably speaks to how ignorant they are about the biotech industry. To produce new drugs, you don’t just need new ideas, you need validated clinical trials, or in other words, you need to put those drugs into bodies and see how they react. China is fast becoming the place to do this because of looser regulator guidelines. It’s a lot quicker if you have an idea to take it to China, run a massive trial as proof of concept, then license it to a big U.S. pharmaceutical for the final phase 2/3 trial and worldwide marketing. Chinese outlicensing deals were well over $100 billion just in the first half of 2026. There’s even a lot of new capital being raised to create new single drug companies to take these Chinese drugs and make a new U.S. company with it without selling to big pharma. So if we get a big explosion in new drugs, new licensed stuff from China, that ought to increase usage. New agentic products are being priced based on usage, not seat based pricing, so the increased number of drugs would be good for Veeva top line. New companies formed to bring Chinese biotech drugs over ought to increase total seats and subscriptions. Both should contribute to an acceleration of the top line and drive earnings growth for several years. A breakdown of the business: R&D and Quality includes software for running the clinical trial, creates the archive of the files necessary for FDA or EMA submission. They also handle the actual task of submitting the files to the FDA, to an upload portal called the electronic submissions gateway. They have a near monopoly on this submission software, they have 19 or the top 20 Pharma companies in this segment. Drug safety logs reports of all side effects in the trial or reported after marketing from doctors, patients, published papers, and the drug company must analyze these and then submit these to the regulators within a deadline. Here Veeva is a challenger with a small market share, the majority of big pharma go with Oracle Argus or ArisGlobal or IQVIA’s solution. Overall R&D and Quality makes up 53% of revenue. The commercial side includes things like medical legal and regulatory (MLR) review, which is a super time consuming process to approve any new drug ad or promotional material for a doctor’s office. It also includes the CRM software (Vault) to log all the doctor office visits for regulatory compliance, and how many prescriptions the doc then writes, along with an anonymized HIPAA compliant software Crossix that connects pharma ads to subsequent scripts for the patient. The CRM side previously has a quasi monopoly on all 20 of the large 20 pharmas but it has been under attack since Veeva previously built its software on top of Salesforce software and now Salesforce created its own CRM and included some agentic software. Veeva responded by making Vault. They got 14 of the top 20 to stay with them and try the new product. Pfizer Takeda Novartis, AstraZeneca are all confirmed switchers to Salesforce system. IQVIA also has an old solution which they are winding down in support of a partnership with Salesforce on their system. Analysts estimate they should retain 70% market share here. Veeva acquired this company called Copli which it now made into Falcon MLR to automate the medical legal and regulatory review, which should save a lot of time and money. All the regulatory and clinical trial management work seems like very mind numbing work which Veeva can automate with AI agents. They shipped agents for the marketing side already and just shipped agentic solutions for clinical trial management and regulatory. Agents for clinical trial data handling should be shipping December 2026. Some valuation thoughts Veeva was part of the “SaaS pocalypse” earlier this year. But after the Q2 earnings, and announcements they are doing their own agentic thing Mr Market changed its mind from AI loser to AI winner and the stock rallied a bunch. More importantly the company is trading at 46X trailing earnings, EV/Sales of 11, EV/EBIT of 38, which is steep compared to Salesforce (EV/Sales of 4.8 and EV/EBIT of 24) and IQVIA (EV/Sales of 3.4 and EV/EBIT of 26X). But Veeva is growing the top line at 18% YOY last quarter and operating profit at 21% last quarter, and it has a whopping 29.6% operating profit margin. As a software company the growth expense is mostly above the operating line so that’s a fairly impressive margin. IQVIA is spending nearly all their FCF on acquisitions to get a measly 8% revenue growth and barely positive on the operating growth line. Salesforce has an 11% sales growth and 9% operating profit growth while it spent the majority of its FCF on acquisitions in the TTM period. Veeva’s growth is mostly organic and it mostly builds its own products, with occasional tactical acquisitions that it turns into new useful products fairly quickly and has a good track record of doing this well. Veeva $7.2 billion in cash and no debt and I’d argue almost all the cash is excess cash since the business throws off a lot of cash and they mostly build their own products. The only thing they need to do with the cash is watch for any new disruptive tech they want (like Copli or Crossix, both acquisitions) and acquire them to build on top of it. Stock based comp is high at nearly $500 million TTM. Buybacks were $750 million TTM, about half of the $1.6 billion FCF. So enough to cancel out the dilutive effects of SBC then a little bit. The diluted share count is going down at 1.6% YoY from buybacks as of last quarter. If they decided the $7.2 billion cash pile is enough for now and ramped up buybacks to all $1.6 billion of FCF, you’d end up with something like a 2.3% buyback yield. Of course they probably need to spend a bit every few years for acquisitions in the space, I’d normalize that to $100-200 million per year so effective FCF something like $1.4-1.5 billion. Not the best, but not too bad considering operating income is still increasing over 20%. I think the macro industry factors I mentioned above will sustain this rate for several years. I don’t expect the multiple to contract much as long as it is growing at this rate which means you can get a return somewhere in the neighborhood of earnings growth. One risk is the multiple is high and it could fall. Maybe rates maybe something else. I don’t really have any defense for this. Should have bought VEEV when it was cheaper in May-June. I’m not sure we will ever see those multiples again. There is competitive threat from IQVIA and Salesforce. IQVIA is in an adjacent industry and has some overlapping products like the old IMS Health but they have a big contract research organization (the old Quintiles) which is large complex and more capital intensive. Salesforce is super large and not very concentrated on pharma, but well financed. Agentic software could be really really expensive and maybe the users don’t want to pay for it. This seems unlikely to me given how much human time they could save and how mind numbing and long the regulatory process is.

NOW and CRM (and SAP) will flourish when the idiots that run WallSt work out that AI can’t replace enterprise software. We’re not talking about out creating a shopping list or making a reservation. We’re talking about running a companies core business. Sales cycles take years. Implementations take years. AI will make them more efficient. Trouble with Oracle is its massive debt with lower recurring revenue compared to Microsoft, Meta, Google, and Amazon. Uber not going anywhere. It’s the coke to Lyfts Pepsi. If Netflix gets back to creating quality shows as opposed to diverse shows and gets out of bed with Obama they can come back.

I'd put a third into indexes like SPHQ, SOXX, SPMV. I like Dividends, I like high quality, I like low volatility factors, I like some US and some international. I have other ETFs and indexes that are low cost that also make money like HOMZ is a housing REIT that pays monthly dividends and it has more than doubled since I bought it during COVID and then it has sat in the $40s but I am just reinvesting the dividends and letting it run forever so my cost basic drops. I have FLIN, FLKR, EWY, EWY, DXJ, and so on for international diversification. So think about your index creatively, do not put all of your eggs into any one basket, in sectors, nations, etc. I'd put the other 2/3rds into 5 different stocks in a diversified best of breed focus. Sector examples of what I like: One Semiconductor I like NVDA best, but AVGO, AMD, INTC, MU, MRVL, etc (I have most of these as well as some not mentioned like QCOM that I am well up in but it really is not doing much) Semi services LAM, AMAT, KLA, etc (I have 2 of these) One Tech I like MSFT, & DELL, but GOOG, APP, AMZN, META all worth consideration. (I have half of these) One Financial I like V, MA, GS, JPM, but BA, WF, AXP, MS all worth looking at (I have the ones that I like) One industrial CMI, DE, CAT, GNRC, SHW, GLW, ETN, etc I have one of these at the moment One Healthcare (I have none of these, I do not like the sector) LLY, MRNA, BMS, AMGN, NOVO, etc etc One Software SNOW, NOW, CRM (I have NOW, love it, shocked at how CRM & SNOW have outperformed NOW so far this year, but NOW looks like a better investment to me). One Cyber-Security PANW, NET, OKTA, CRWD, ZS, FTNT. I have 3 of these. Energy ARRY, FLSR, GEV, CVX, XOM, BE, DNNGY, I have all of the renewables via stock ownership and gas & oil via low cost ETF like XLE instead of individual stocks Aerospace, defense, space, communications, and so on are other sectors as well as consumer staples, consumer discretionary, I'd look for value and/or growth catalysts. High quality, profitable, nice cash flow, any moat, etc, Example: I think that the market is dead wrong on APP, I do not see the legal cases as a problem, and while Unreal seems like a threat, it is a very different customer that uses Unreal game development for the ads. So find areas where you think that the market is wrong. I bought PLTR at $8 per share when no one loved it. I took out my cost basis at $80 (sold 10%) and sold another 10% at $120 and just play with house money and ignore it now, IDGAF what it does, I am letting the rest ride or die. Sometimes I lose. I am underwater on APP, but I am sticking with it, the revenue miss was still a very nice year over year increase. If it goes down more, I will add to my position and lower my cost basis. I am not abandoning a company that is literally printing money. So you want diversification because it makes betting against a trend less painful like I am doing with HOMZ and APP. Because even when those go down, my portfolio is still mostly going up.

Sure…. [https://www.newsquawk.com/headlines/sanofi-san-fp-to-reduce-usage-of-servicenow-now-it-management-software-with-in-house-ai-agent-developed-in-partnership-with-claude-and-elementum-reports-the-information](https://www.newsquawk.com/headlines/sanofi-san-fp-to-reduce-usage-of-servicenow-now-it-management-software-with-in-house-ai-agent-developed-in-partnership-with-claude-and-elementum-reports-the-information) [https://www.businessinsider.com/curative-ceo-salesforce-vibecode-crm-2026-7](https://www.businessinsider.com/curative-ceo-salesforce-vibecode-crm-2026-7) [Sweden's Klarna shifts AI focus from cost cuts to growth | Reuters](https://www.reuters.com/business/swedens-klarna-shifts-ai-focus-cost-cuts-growth-2025-09-10/) Klarna dropped CRM to kill a seven figure cost. [https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/s/R3w2acBUOr](https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/s/R3w2acBUOr) [https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/s/zPBpBSCmTw](https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/s/zPBpBSCmTw) [https://www.reddit.com/r/uae\_startups/s/yVW9E7McIH](https://www.reddit.com/r/uae_startups/s/yVW9E7McIH) [https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/s/vXwdSsfnfT](https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/s/vXwdSsfnfT)

The thing is, I don't necessarily think they are all dying, but margin pressure will be huge. Many developers might produce similar products a fraction of the cost . E.g. there is basically a open source version of Adobe Photoshop, built only by ai tools. Useless for B2B right now, but if small companies develop similar products this stuff could really hurt some companies. Even though I must say stuff like fully integrated ERP/CRM is dang hard to replace.

Adobe, figma, intuit are companies that are mostly horizontally integrated with their customers. They offer a core set of products that are easier for AI disruptors to copy and replace Companies that are vertically integrated with customers (processes and across various teams) and serve as key systems of record are much harder to replace. You can’t easily change processes across all departments nor can you risk AI hallucinating and messing up important data. This is why companies like CRM, ServiceNow, Atlassian etc have a stronger moat vs AI

Ok, you’re clearly not hearing me or haven’t gained enough experience yet. AWS is redundant hardware, multiple physical locations, etc. Your argument there is irrelevant. We’re talking about replacing software. With AI, the barrier to software and data migration is reduced to nearly zero. What used to take a full team of engineers is now a few intermediates in internet with AI tokens and one or two sr engineers stitching it together. If a random dude can reproduce the entire adobe suite, even without being feature complete, a CRM is peanuts. The market is pricing that in. I suggest you familiarize yourself more with this ecosystem.

I agree they can save some money. But just try to imagine the complexity. So if a corporate which isn’t primarily a tech company will add a big team to create salesforce in house, they will hire one more team of engineers to build SAP in house, then they will say oh why should we pay AWS to run our servers, let’s build those as well in house 🤷‍♂️. Even when AWS was way expensive than hosting on premise servers, companies were still using AWS. Why? Because they dont want to maintain a team of engineers just to maintain infrastructure. A business does not only thrive on saving money. A balance is required. Yes they will save money wherever they can but there are somethings which will eventually be outsourced. It was happening and it will happen. When a corporate is selling biscuits online, why would they go and say okay let’s create our own CRM. They exist because they are good at selling biscuits not because they are good at maintain customer data in some server. No company will allocate resources to do that unless they are a tech company. Please go and work for a corporate and see how they do budget allocations. There are companies that are still using 2015 tech because they don’t need a newer website. They want to sell their product which the current website is capable of doing. They don’t give a f about creating a new team to revamp their e-commerce platform and spend millions just so that they can have an app create on JavaScript instead of php.

CRM is the only one I’ll touch on that list. Maybe NOW and MCD but not much of those.

My point is how and why do you think as a retail company for example Target. Why would Target think of creating it’s own CRM and invest money to create a CRM first, then pay engineers, pay infrastructure costs and then maintain a team which will eventually maintain the CRM for years? Why wouldn’t they go to some already existing CRM services and say we need this service? With this logic companies will eventually start creating their own LLMs as well. They will eventually say oh why should I pay openAi or anthropic. I will train my own trillion parameter model and use that in house.

NOW and CRM.

AVGO, CRM. Boring companies but they are money printers. maybe NFLX, but I d wait another quarter.

Uber and Adobe, CRM too long term but above $200 it is not worth it for me personally

I bought > $100K of KLAC during this downturn, it's still a buy under $240 I think. Might pick up more AVGO, too. Benefited from the recovery in CRM & NOW. Missing from this collection is MSFT, bought $200K from 350-450.

AVGO , NOW, CRM

I'll give like 6 stocks best to worst (in my opinion) 1-ORCL 2-UBER 3-AVGO 4-NFLX 5-INTU maybe NOW and CRM as well

The fact that the previous three comments point to four different CRMs for the same company is funny, but so true in my experience and highlights the distinction that can exist in large organizations.  It’s so hard to have a single system that can accommodate so many unique business processes, BUs are acquired, splinter groups build their own systems.  Each CRM claims to be the system of record, but then there are multiple CRMs. Writing this out has given me a better appreciation of Salesforce’s acquisition of Informatica.

Really interesting seeing how Palantir is using AI to automate parts of its forward deployed engineer model by letting it keep the customization and stickiness of bespoke deployments without scaling headcount the same way. Competitors can copy FDE playbook but replicating Palantir’s field to product feedback loop is way harder which is how it can keep the stickiness of services with software margins. Other AI stocks to watch: $NOW, $MAAS, $CRM, $PATH, $SNOW

Iren, adbe, CRM, Orcl celh

If I have to spy on a signal I just use something like wireshark, capture what I need and feed it into Ai. Most of the time I'm not working with these types of apps anymore. I used to a fair bit. Back in the day I was into embedded and some automotive hacking, myself and one other person broke open the entire Subaru tuning scene, with him designing the cable and me rev engineering the ecu. Now I'm all about connecting to api's etc., writing CRM, ERP systems from scratch for big bucks. So maybe it's a viable workflow? I've never done what you are talking about. When I was decompiling it was a long time ago and all manual and slow going, no Ai then. I just don't see a need for what I'm doing but that doesn't mean for you it's not an amazing workflow. Best of luck to you comrad.

I think the primary case thought around this is SaaS that are System of Records (example: $NOW, $CRM, $SAP) will continue to gain ground while personal software will lose in the long term ( example: $INTU, $ADBE ) None of this is set in stone and investors are still separating the chaff from the wheat.

For some odd reason all the tickers i now trade start with the letter C - CRWD, CRWV, CRCL, COIN, and CRM just crazy

There is a new competitor in ArtiosCAD too for a fraction of the price with way more features = 3Dpacksim.com. Esko is in the same boat. CRM's are also coming out in a trickle. The thing is like others have mentioned is the enterprise agreements, but now options are available and companies are going to be looking to save some $$$.

[CRM](https://www.onvista.de/aktien/SALESFORCE-INC-Aktie-US79466L3024) - Salesforce 📃@200,25€(+0,31% 🥱) [NOW](https://www.onvista.de/aktien/SERVICENOW-INC-Aktie-US81762P1021) - ServiceNow 📃@123,05€(+0,04% 🥱) [ADBE](https://www.onvista.de/aktien/Adobe-Systems-Aktie-US00724F1012) - Adobe 📃@209,90€(+1,23% 🤑)