After years of diluting shareholders (30% over four years to be precise), Salesforce (CRM) has suddenly gotten buyback religion and announced an additional buyback of $10 billion last week. The buyback represented around 6% of its market cap at announcement. Salesforce announced its first-ever $10 billion buyback last year in August and upgraded it to $20 billion on March 1, 2023.
Since that announcement last year, the company has repurchased a smidgen of stock after taking stock-based compensation into account, which was an astounding $809 million last quarter. For fiscal 2023, which ended in January 2023, the company had $3.28 billion in stock-based compensation expenses, a record for the company. Shareholders were left with a paltry $208 million in GAAP net income. It is not surprising that there was a management shakeup at the company and not one, but six activists are involved as we cover later in this article.