After Bloomberg reported this afternoon that Salesforce has hired bankers to field takeover inquiries, JPMorgan analyst Mark Murphy told investors that he believes the stock could be worth $100 in a buyout. Shares closed the trading day up $7.76 to $74.65. A deal would be the largest in software history, and only a short list of companies could pull it off, Murphy wrote. Those companies are Microsoft (MSFT), Oracle (ORCL), IBM (IBM) and SAP (SAP), he believes. After pointing out JPMorgan has "no conclusive evidence to confirm or dispel the speculation," Murphy noted Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff was sitting in the front row of the Microsoft Build Conference this morning and that Oracle just raised $10B of debt. The analyst calls Salesforce a "rare asset" and the "pioneering leader of the cloud computing." He has an Overweight rating on the shares.
News For CRM;MSFT;ORCL;IBM;SAP From the Last 2 Days
Microsoft's (MSFT) Rare said that its 2018 video game "Sea of Thieves," has achieved 40M players across Xbox, Windows 10 and Steam so far. The Fly notes that the game is set to release on PlayStation 5 (SONY) on April 30. Reference Link
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Morgan Stanley notes that Salesforce (CRM) management has advised investors that strategic M&A would be coming back into the company's toolkit at some point and recent press speculation about the company being in advanced talks to buy Informatica (INFA) suggests the company "may be ready to break the ice." While any significant M&A brings execution risks and "increased angst from investors still harboring memories of prior expensive deals," the analyst says a rumored transaction with Informatica, if it were to be confirmed and the deal were to be struck around a $12B enterprise value, looks to meet Salesforce's "criteria for responsible M&A." The firm, which sees potential for a complementary expansion that further buttresses the capabilities of Mulesoft and Data Cloud, has an Overweight rating and $350 price target on Salesforce shares.
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Evercore ISI is adding IBM (IBM) to the firm's "Tactical Outperform" list ahead of the company's March-end quarter results announcement on Wednesday April 24 as it expects the company to report revenue and EPS that are in-line to showing moderate upside compared to consensus estimates. Though there have been concerns surrounding the potential for weakness in Consulting given softness at Accenture (ACN), Evercore thinks recent macro and IT spending data points have been improving and Consulting momentum should continue, says the firm, which hsa an Outperform rating and $215 price target on IBM shares.