Salesforce Gets Spicy 🌶️ 💰

Salesforce brought the sauce for earnings today. 🔥 🌶️

The CRM software announced earnings of $1.48 per share. Analysts were expecting just $0.92, making for a pretty beefy beat. To make matters even better, the company bested analysts’ revenue estimates, too — the company posted $6.34 billion in revenue, up 23% YoY.

The bulk of revenue came from subscriptions, which represented $5.91 billion (93.2%). The other notable revenue came from professional services and other services. The company also completed its acquisition of Slack this quarter, which will go a long way to expanding Salesforce’s product offerings. Slack is expected to contribute $530 million in income to the company this year. That might not sound like much, but that’s still money.

But wait, there’s more: regarding the company’s earnings guidance, Salesforce now anticipates $26.2 billion in revenue and an EPS of $4.36-$4.38 for FY 2021. Regarding Salesforce’s stock price, increased guidance and good news pushed $CRM 2% higher in AH.

Salesforce-backed Snowflake also reported after the bell, recording a loss of ($0.64) per share and $272 million in revenue. While revenue beat analysts’ expectations, EPS was starkly below hopeful expectations. $SNOW fell 1.3% in AH.

The Wall Street Journal reported today that chipmaker Western Digital is in talks to merge with Kioxia Holdings (one of the largest manufacturers of flash memory). The deal is expected to be worth $20 billion.

The news helped push other semi stocks north, granting the entire sector some reprieve from recent bearish narratives. ⚡ The VanEck Vectors Semiconductor ETF picked up 1.09% today.

Flash memory is the backbone for solid state storage, flash drives, and other types of “non-volatile” data storage devices. For that reason, it has become a critical ingredient in computer equipment over the last decade. In Q1 2021, Kioxia represented 18.7% of NAND flash manufacturers’ revenue. Kioxa was second to only Samsung, which owns over a third of the market. 

Western Digital, a goliath in data storage, wasn’t far behind. WD owns 14.7% of the market, meaning a combo of these two players could pose a strong threat to Samsung’s market leadership… still, it’s not over ’til it’s over.

Several months ago, $WDC and $MU were both rumored to be seeking a deal with the Japanese company. Even amidst all the M&A buzz in the semiconductor space, not every deal has closed. For example, Intel’s rumored attempts to acquire GlobalFoundries went in vain. 💁‍♀️

It’s expected that GloFo will take the IPO path by itself, and Kioxa could possibly opt to do the same. Kioxia is majority-owned by Bain Capital Private Equity and Toshiba.

$WDC rose 7.8% today on the news. 

Avalanche isn’t just soaring… it’s roaring. 🦁 The price of $AVAX.X, the native coin of the Avalanche network, has more than doubled in the last week. It’s up 341% over the last 30 days.

Why the bullish buzz?? 🐝 The launch of Avalanche Rush, a new $180 million liquidity mining incentive on the Avalanche blockchain. The launch doubled as a welcome party for three highly-recognizable DeFi protocols: Aave, Curve Finance, and Sushiswap. The three will host a large portion of the liquidity mining event.

Sushiswap and Curve Finance are two prominent DEXes on Ethereum, which have begun to add functionality on other blockchains over the last few months. Aave, Ethereum’s biggest lending platform, already offers support on Ethereum and Polygon network.

We know what you’re thinking: why are there so many protocols and so many blockchains? Well, with so many cryptocurrencies vouching for investors’ dollars, protocols see one way to pull in prospective investors: pander to them all. After all, it’s not easy to move money from blockchain-to-blockchain.

Even if blockchains have a Bridge to help move assets, some people will stick with their faves. Multichain protocols are likely to become more and more common, and existing protocols will likely have to grapple with whether to expand their horizons or risk being dethroned by competing services.

Concretely, though: it’s easy to see why investors like this move for Avalanche (and its new friends.) The addition of these three DeFi players add a lot of legitimacy to the project. It’s certainly a big victory for them, but they still have to leverage it to keep the momentum.

U.S. authorities are investigating Deutsche Bank — again. Apparently, DWS Group (Deutsche’s $1 trillion asset management arm) overstated the sustainable investing criteria used in its environmental, social, and governance (ESG) strategy. 

Deutsche supposedly misled investors on the holdings in its ESG investing strategy, attempting to portray its investments in a (deceptively) positive light. In March 2021, DWS reported over $900 billion in assets invested with ESG strategy; secondary reports show only a fraction of the $900 billion actually followed sustainable investing criteria. 

DWS claims ESG is at the “heart of everything it does,” but the firm’s former sustainability chief begged to differ. Desiree Fixler, former DWS sustainability chief, claimed the asset manager struggled with its ESG strategy and misrepresented its ESG capabilities. Fixler was fired on Mar. 11. 🤔

Not again… in January, Deutsche bank paid $130 million to resolve commodities-fraud and bribery charges. 🤦‍♀️ What’s the deal, Deutsche??