YCHART OF THE DAY: Salesforce.com – The Growth Is Only Profitable If You’re Selling the Stock

salesforce.com Revenues Chart by YCharts

Salesforce.com (CRM), which sells cloud computing services (park it on our servers, not your own) and CRM functions so your employees can share information, loves to talk about revenue growth (36% for the nine months ended Oct. 31) and non-GAAP EPS (leaves out the annoying expenses involved in actually running a publicly-traded company). But make no mistake: Salesforce.com is losing money. Why? Sales and marketing costs consume more than half of revenue. When the market values you at nearly eight times sales, and largely ignores the losses, you go get sales. Insiders keep selling. Competitors – Microsoft (MSFT), Oracle (ORCL), SAP (SAP), IBM (IBM) – are all very profitable.