What Makes Salesforce (CRM) a Wonderful Business to Invest In?

Oakmark Funds, advised by Harris Associates, released its “Oakmark Fund” second quarter 2025 investor letter. A copy of the letter can be downloaded here. In the second quarter, the fund underperformed its benchmark, the S&P 500 Index, but outperformed the benchmark since inception. The largest contributors to performance were financials and consumer discretionary, at the sector level, while health care and consumer staples detracted. In addition, you can check the fund’s top 5 holdings to determine its best picks for 2025.

In its second quarter 2025 investor letter, Oakmark Fund highlighted stocks such as Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM). Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM) offers Customer Relationship Management (CRM) technology that brings companies and customers together. The one-month return of Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM) was -0.60%, and its shares gained 2.68% of their value over the last 52 weeks. On July 16, 2025, Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM) stock closed at $257.95 per share, with a market capitalization of $246.6 billion.

Oakmark Fund stated the following regarding Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM) in its second quarter 2025 investor letter:

"Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM) is a leading technology company that offers a collection of software products aimed at providing businesses with a full front office productivity suite. We believe Salesforce is a wonderful business going through a transformation into a profitable, shareholder-focused enterprise. Since management announced their renewed focus on operating discipline a couple years ago, Salesforce’s margins have increased substantially. In our view, there is further room to improve as the company leverages its unique position to help businesses deploy AI and continues to restructure its sales organization. Since exiting our position in Salesforce in December, the stock price has declined by over 30% despite continuing to report fundamental results that are in line with our expectations. We were pleased to buy the stock, but we first established our position using a put writing strategy to lower our entry price. We believed the puts were overvalued as they implied that Salesforce was among the most volatile large companies, which was completely at odds with our assessment of its business value."

Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM) is in 16th position on our list of 30 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. As per our database, 140 hedge fund portfolios held Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM) at the end of the first quarter, which was 162 in the previous quarter. In the fiscal first quarter of 2026, Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM) delivered $9.83 billion in revenue representing an 8% increase from last year’s comparable quarter. While we acknowledge the potential of CRM as an investment, we believe certain AI stocks offer greater upside potential and carry less downside risk. If you're looking for an extremely undervalued AI stock that also stands to benefit significantly from Trump-era tariffs and the onshoring trend, see our free report on the best short-term AI stock.

In another article, we covered Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM) and shared the list of must-watch AI stocks on Wall Street. In addition, please check out our hedge fund investor letters Q2 2025 page for more investor letters from hedge funds and other leading investors.

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Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.