Wednesday preview: Pets at Home, Salesforce results in focus

(Sharecast News) - On Wednesday, Greencore and Hollywood Bowl will publish interim results, while Pets at Home and HICL Infrastructure will release full-year results. Across the pond, quarterly results are due from Marvell Technology, HP and Salesforce.

As far as Salesforce's first-quarter results are concerned, Matt Britzman, senior equity analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown, said the focus will be less on whether the headline numbers are respectable and more on whether management can give investors the confidence that growth is ready to pick up again.

"The last quarter was solid enough, with revenue and profit broadly in line with expectations, but guidance raised some questions," he said. "Full-year revenue guidance implies 10-11% growth, though around three percentage points of that comes from the recently acquired Informatica business.

"AI remains the key swing factor. Agentforce and Data Cloud are growing quickly from a small base, but the bigger Salesforce machine is still being held back by softer growth in parts of the core business. It's probably still too early to materially alter the 'software is dead' narrative that's been swirling around Salesforce for months.

"Still, at the very least, investors should be hoping for more confidence around the expected second-half acceleration because, without that, Salesforce risks looking more like a mature software business than a re-energised growth story."