Latest news with #Luria
Business Insider
16 hours ago
- Business
- Business Insider
Salesforce Stock (NYSE:CRM) Gets Mixed Signals from Wall Street
Software giant Salesforce (CRM) is facing challenges as growth slows and competition heats up, even as it invests heavily in artificial intelligence (AI). Recently, two five-star analysts expressed mixed opinions on the stock. DA Davidson analyst Gil Luria upgraded the stock to Hold, while Barclays analyst Raimo Lenschow kept a Buy rating, expecting short-term gains. Elevate Your Investing Strategy: Take advantage of TipRanks Premium at 50% off! Unlock powerful investing tools, advanced data, and expert analyst insights to help you invest with confidence. DA Davidson Upgrades, But With Caution Luria upgraded Salesforce stock's rating to Hold from Sell, keeping a price target of $225. The move comes after the stock underperformed the iShares Expanded Tech-Software Sector ETF (IGV) by 48 percentage points year-to-date. Luria cited falling investor sentiment as justified, pointing to slowing organic growth and mounting pressure from rivals. However, after hedge fund Starboard Value boosted its stake in Salesforce by 47%, the analyst believes more activist pressure could help the company get back on track. Barclays Sees Short-Term Upside Lenschow offered a more optimistic take. He believes U.S. software stocks, including Salesforce, could see a short-term bounce this earnings season, even as concerns over generative AI linger. Lenschow noted strong customer interest in Salesforce's AI offerings and expects the company to post a modest beat this quarter. He sees October's Dreamforce event, where CRM is likely to unveil the next version of Agentforce, as a key catalyst. Overall, the analyst maintained a Buy rating but trimmed the price target to $316 from $347. What's Next for Salesforce? Looking ahead, Salesforce's upcoming earnings, due for release on September 3, and its Dreamforce event might aid in winning back investors' confidence. If the company is able to prove that AI is helping without hurting its main business, momentum could return. Currently, Wall Street analysts expect CRM to report earnings of $2.78 in fiscal Q2, compared to $2.56 in the prior-year quarter. Also, the company's revenue for Q2 is expected to rise by about 9% year-over-year to $10.14 billion. Is CRM a Buy, Sell, or Hold? Turning to Wall Street, CRM stock has a Moderate Buy consensus rating based on 33 Buys, 10 Holds, and one Sell assigned in the last three months. At $347.51, the average Salesforce stock price target implies a 42.44% upside potential.
Business Insider
3 days ago
- Business
- Business Insider
'An Equity Stake': Intel Stock (NASDAQ:INTC) Surges as U.S. Government May Buy In With CHIPS Act Money
Earlier this week, we got news that chip stock Intel (INTC) CEO Lip-Bu Tan would be meeting with the Trump cabinet in a bid to come up with some ideas to help get Intel back up and running to its fullest. Well, one of those ideas may have surfaced, and it is a doozy. New reports suggest that the United States government may buy a stake in Intel using CHIPS Act money. That news sent Intel shares blasting up, gaining over 4.5% in Friday afternoon's trading. Elevate Your Investing Strategy: Take advantage of TipRanks Premium at 50% off! Unlock powerful investing tools, advanced data, and expert analyst insights to help you invest with confidence. The reports noted that the CHIPS Act money—some of which Intel has already received—may be used to, if only in part, set up an equity stake in Intel. Naturally, this is still very early-stage stuff, and any part of it could change, including all of it. Intel already had access to billions in grants, and an additional $11 billion in loans connected to the CHIPS Act. And a lot of the CHIPS Act money is currently considered 'dormant,' reports note, with the Trump administration eager to get that funding into '…sectors it deems central to national security,' like chip processing. This will undoubtedly be welcome news for Intel, which has been laying off people and closing divisions for the last few months now. 'Essential' For National Security Meanwhile, word from D.A. Davidson analyst Gil Luria —who has a five-star rating on TipRanks—certainly approves of such a move. Luria noted that, while 'we don't want government to intervene and own private enterprise…this is national security.' Luria further noted, 'We can't rely on somebody else making shell casings for our nuclear arsenal. We have to get it right.' The idea is reasonable, even if the metaphor is a bit mixed. Still, this might be an interesting start to the notion of a 'sovereign wealth fund' that the Trump Administration advanced a while back. And it certainly will give Intel a leg up that needs to happen lest the United States lose ground in chip production altogether. Is Intel a Buy, Hold or Sell? Turning to Wall Street, analysts have a Hold consensus rating on INTC stock based on one Buy, 26 Holds and three Sells assigned in the past three months, as indicated by the graphic below. After a 14.33% rally in its share price over the past year, the average INTC price target of $22.24 per share implies 10.52% downside risk.
CNBC
4 days ago
- Business
- CNBC
Government Intel intervention is 'essential' for national security, tech analyst says
A government intervention in struggling chipmaker Intel is "essential" for the sake of national security, analyst Gil Luria said Friday, following a report that the Trump administration is weighing taking a stake in the company. "We're all capitalists," Luria, head of technology research at D.A. Davidson, said in an interview with CNBC's "Squawk Box." "We don't want government to intervene and own private enterprise, but this is national security." Bloomberg reported Thursday that the Trump administration is considering having the U.S. government take a stake in Intel. The news sent Intel shares higher, and the stock climbed again Friday. Intel previously declined to comment on the report. Luria said such a deal is needed to revive Intel and reduce the country's reliance on companies like Samsung and Taiwan Semiconductor to manufacture chips. President Donald Trump has called for more chips and high-end technology to be made in the U.S. How the White House could structure such an intervention is still in question. Bloomberg reported Friday that the administration has discussed using funds from the CHIPS Act. "Intel has had many opportunities over decades to get it right, and it hasn't. So we need to intervene," Luria said. "The government's going to come in and it's going to give Intel unfair advantages, and if it's going to do that, it wants a piece of the business." Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan met with Trump at the White House on Monday after the president called for his resignation based on allegations that he has ties to China. Luria pointed to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's comments that the rise of superintelligent AI could be "the next wave of nuclear proliferation," as evidence that direct intervention by the government is needed. "We can't rely on somebody else making shell casings for our nuclear arsenal," Luria said. "We have to get it right."
CNBC
12-08-2025
- Business
- CNBC
No stock in history has had more influence over the S&P 500 than Nvidia. What could go wrong?
The boom in artificial intelligence since late 2022 has made Nvidia's market value the largest in the S & P 500. But some on Wall Street are skeptical now that its dominance will continue. Nvidia's market capitalization — its stock price multiplied by the number of shares outstanding — ended Monday at roughly $4.5 trillion, equal to about 8% of the S & P 500. That's the "biggest weight in the S & P 500 of any individual stock," in data going back to 1981 , according to Apollo Global Management's chief economist, Torsten Slok. This comes on the heels of Nvidia shares seeing massive gains, having soared 239% in 2023, more than 171% in 2024 and 36% in 2025, through Monday's close. In the past three months alone, as the market fought its way back from April's brief tariff despair, Nvidia is 56% higher. Nearly nine out of every 10 analysts who cover Jensen Huang's company on Wall Street rate it a buy, and Nvidia now sells for 59 times its trailing 12-month earnings, according to FactSet data. "There's a reason the stock is up here, which is Nvidia continues to provide most of the most critical equipment for AI and the demand for AI usage," said D.A. Davidson analyst Gil Luria, one of the more bearish voices on Nvidia. "So, inferencing continues to rise as the models become ever so potent." NVDA 3M mountain NVDA, 3-month But there are two areas that could go wrong for Nvidia, according to Luria, who rates Nvidia a neutral and whose $135 price target implies that the stock will slide about 26% over the next year. One red flag is China. "The back and forth between the U.S. government, the Chinese government and Nvidia is a risk to a very big part of Nvidia's market," Luria continued. "They only report low-double-digit sales into China. It's safe to assume that a lot of their other sales are indirectly to China, either to Chinese companies domiciled otherwise, or sales to resellers that ultimately arrive in China. So, it's a big part of their sales that is at risk from either further action by [the] U.S. or by further restrictions from China." This past weekend, the Financial Times reported that Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices both agreed to give the U.S. government 15% share of revenues from chips sold in China in exchange for export licenses. Wells Fargo said Nvidia can grow more than 20% as a result of the agreement, which Luria described as uncertain at the same time as it "probably bodes well for their ability to sell the B30 [chips] either later this year or at some point next year. " Beyond the lack of clarity surrounding Nvidia's presence in the Chinese market, another bottleneck also poses a threat to the company's breakneck growth. "What most of their big customers are now talking about is that the chips aren't the bottleneck – it's the ability to have a data center on the power grid with HVAC equipment ready for chips that's holding them back," Luria added. That has already started to affect the company, the D.A. Davidson analyst pointed out. "The growth in electricity usage by data centers is so significant that we're going to start running into power limitations and electricity limitations. So, Nvidia's ability to grow may start being gated by factors that are out of their control," he added. Peter Boockvar, chief investment officer at One Point BFG Wealth Partners, told CNBC that, as the market leader, Nvidia may eventually face another challenge as a result of the AI boom: increasing competition. For instance, Amazon Web Services has been making efforts to rival Nvidia when it comes to AI infrastructure , saying earlier this year that it's looking to reduce training costs associated with AI and provide an alternative to Nvidia's GPUs. "While they are riding an incredible and massive CapEx spending wave on the GenAI model [and] data center buildout, selling semis is still a very competitive and cyclical business," Boockvar said. "Nvidia's around 75% gross [profit] margin is not a long-term sustainable level, especially as their current biggest customers are all looking to be eventual competitors."
CNBC
08-08-2025
- Business
- CNBC
Tech is getting a boost from AI ad tools. Some companies are being left behind
Artificial intelligence has been a shot in the arm for digital advertising. Meta and Alphabet both reported sales and earnings that beat Wall Street's expectations, but the strength in digital ad spend was notable. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during the earnings call that AI helped imbue "greater efficiency and gains across our ad system," thus contributing to the 22% year-over-year increase of second-quarter sales that hit $47.52 billion. Meta finance chief Susan Li also told analysts during a follow-up earnings call on July 30 that the online ad market appears to have improved since April. In April, Li noted that Asia-based online retailers pulled back on their digital ad spending amid broader macroeconomic uncertainty due to President Donald Trump's tough tariffs and the closing of the de minimis trade loophole. This quarter, Li said there's been a noticeable "improvement" with those Asian-based ecommerce firms, which have increased their digital ad spending on the platform along with small, North American-based advertisers. "We generally expect another quarter of healthy advertising demand," Li said about the advertising pickup. Gil Luria, the head of technology research at D.A. Davidson, said that while there is still broader macroeconomic uncertainty, "today, digital advertising in general, is doing well; It is simply an extension of the fact that the consumer is still strong." "There's optimism that consumer spending will hold up and therefore all the downstream markets will hold up," Luria said. "I think one of the things that its earnings taught us was that you can spend a lot of money on AI when your core business is doing well, and especially when your core business has been already benefiting from the investments that you've made in AI," Jasmine Enberg, a vice president and principal analyst for eMarketer, said about Meta's second quarter. The continued jaw-dropping pace of AI spending also doesn't seem to be slowing any time soon. Alphabet added an extra $10 billion to its 2025 forecast for capital expenditures, now pegged at $85 billion, while Meta raised the low end of its capital expenditures for the year to come in between $66 billion and $72 billion instead of $64 billion and $72 billion. Investors showed no signs of trepidation about Meta and Alphabet's massive AI spend because those companies' overall sales continued to rise. Outside of the tech giants, Reddit reported strong second-quarter sales of $500 million, representing a 78% year-over-year increase that helped lift the company's shares as much as 20%. "They kind of rose back like a phoenix and had some extraordinary results," Luria said about Reddit, which saw its shares plummet over 15% in February after it reported weaker-than-expected user numbers due to a Google search algorithm change. Reddit's blockbuster quarter contrasted with similar-sized peers like Snap and Pinterest, which both reported lukewarm quarterly earnings this week. Snap's second-quarter sales grew only 9% year-over-year and it missed Wall Street's estimates on global average revenue per user, a metric that refers to how much money the company derives from each user. Contributing to the miss was a botched update to Snap's advertising platform that hurt the company's "topline growth," Snap CEO Evan Spiegel said in an investor letter. The Snapchat parent on Wednesday also added Reddit to its list of competitors in its latest 10-Q filing on Wednesday, indicating a potential, burgeoning rivalry. Meanwhile, Pinterest shares sank over 10% on Thursday after it reported second-quarter earnings that missed on earnings per share. Pinterest finance chief Julia Brau Donnelly told analysts during an earnings call that the company is still noticing some tariff-related concerns, "and broader market uncertainty" as it previously indicated in May. Unlike Meta, Donnelly said that "Asia-based e-commerce retailers pulled back spend in the U.S.," underscoring how some advertisers gravitate toward bigger online ad platforms amid any signs of global economic uncertainty. "There's very little room for mistakes or missteps," Engberg said about the quarterly earnings reports from smaller tech firms like Snap and Pinterest. WATCHTech growth rates are remaining robust.
