Salesforce (NYSE:CRM) & Trend Micro (OTCMKTS:TMICY) Critical Survey

Salesforce (NYSE:CRM) and Trend Micro (OTCMKTS:TMICY) are both computer and technology companies, but which is the superior investment? We will contrast the two companies based on the strength of their risk, analyst recommendations, valuation, earnings, institutional ownership, profitability and dividends.

Risk & Volatility

Salesforce has a beta of 1.25, meaning that its share price is 25% more volatile than the S&P 500. Comparatively, Trend Micro has a beta of 0.61, meaning that its share price is 39% less volatile than the S&P 500.

Analyst Ratings

This is a breakdown of recent ratings and target prices for Salesforce and Trend Micro, as reported by MarketBeat.com.

	Sell Ratings	Hold Ratings	Buy Ratings	Strong Buy Ratings	Rating Score
Salesforce	1	9	24	1	2.71
Trend Micro	0	0	0	0	N/A

Salesforce currently has a consensus target price of $292.79, suggesting a potential upside of 20.44%. Given Salesforce’s higher probable upside, research analysts clearly believe Salesforce is more favorable than Trend Micro.

Insider & Institutional Ownership

80.4% of Salesforce shares are held by institutional investors. Comparatively, 0.0% of Trend Micro shares are held by institutional investors. 3.2% of Salesforce shares are held by company insiders. Strong institutional ownership is an indication that endowments, large money managers and hedge funds believe a company will outperform the market over the long term.

Profitability

This table compares Salesforce and Trend Micro’s net margins, return on equity and return on assets.

	Net Margins	Return on Equity	Return on Assets
Salesforce	15.30%	11.57%	7.18%
Trend Micro	5.92%	9.97%	4.16%

Earnings & Valuation

This table compares Salesforce and Trend Micro’s revenue, earnings per share and valuation.

	Gross Revenue	Price/Sales Ratio	Net Income	Earnings Per Share	Price/Earnings Ratio
Salesforce	$34.86 billion	6.76	$4.14 billion	$5.56	43.72
Trend Micro	$1.77 billion	3.16	$76.20 million	$0.77	51.59

Salesforce has higher revenue and earnings than Trend Micro. Salesforce is trading at a lower price-to-earnings ratio than Trend Micro, indicating that it is currently the more affordable of the two stocks.

Dividends

Salesforce pays an annual dividend of $0.40 per share and has a dividend yield of 0.2%. Trend Micro pays an annual dividend of $4.11 per share and has a dividend yield of 10.3%. Salesforce pays out 7.2% of its earnings in the form of a dividend. Trend Micro pays out 533.8% of its earnings in the form of a dividend, suggesting it may not have sufficient earnings to cover its dividend payment in the future.

Summary

Salesforce beats Trend Micro on 14 of the 16 factors compared between the two stocks.

About Salesforce

Salesforce, Inc. provides Customer Relationship Management (CRM) technology that brings companies and customers together worldwide. The company's service includes sales to store data, monitor leads and progress, forecast opportunities, gain insights through analytics and artificial intelligence, and deliver quotes, contracts, and invoices; and service that enables companies to deliver trusted and highly personalized customer support at scale. In addition, its platform offering comprise a flexible platform that enables companies of various sizes, locations, and industries to build business workflow and apps with customer; online learning platform that allows anyone to learn in-demand Salesforce skills; and Slack, an intelligent productivity platform. The company's marketing services enables companies to plan, personalize, automate, and optimize customer marketing journey, connecting interaction, and connected products; and commerce services, which empowers shopping experience across various customer touchpoint, such as mobile, web, social, and stores and provides click-to-code tools that offers customers to build and deploy solutions. Further, its analytics offering includes Tableau, an end-to-end analytics solution for range of enterprise use cases and intelligent analytics with AI models, spot trends, predict outcomes, creates summaries, timely recommendations, and take action from any device; and integration service including MuleSoft, which provides building blocks to deliver end-to-end and connected experiences. Additionally, the company provides data cloud, a hyperscale data engine native to Salesforce; vertical services to meet the needs of customers in industries, such as financial services, healthcare and life sciences, manufacturing and automotive and government; and offers salesforce starter for small and medium-sized businesses. Salesforce, Inc. was incorporated in 1999 and is headquartered in San Francisco, California.

About Trend Micro

Trend Micro Incorporated develops and sells security-related software for computers and related services in Japan and internationally. The company offers platforms, such as vision one platform, attack surface management, extended detection and response (XDR), cloud security, endpoint security, network security, email security, OT/ICS security, and threat intelligence. It also provides services packages, managed XDR, incident response, and support services. Additionally, the company serves 5G networks, healthcare, manufacturing, oil and gas, electric utility, and automotive industries. The company was incorporated in 1965 and is headquartered in Tokyo, Japan.