HSBC has identified Oracle ( ORCL ) and Salesforce ( CRM ) as among the 11 best performing US stocks in the upcoming earnings season. The investment bank noted that exposure to strong competitive advantages and artificial intelligence tailwinds could lead to sustainable growth.
Analyst Nicole Inouye selects companies in sectors such as consumer, healthcare, and technology with a focus on the 2026 outlook, margin pressure, and AI-related spending.
Oracle and Salesforce are two enterprise software giants that continue to widen their AI gap amid a rapidly evolving technology landscape. With a strong backlog, Oracle offers investors strong future revenue visibility, as its cloud infrastructure and autonomous database capabilities remain important as enterprises race to deploy AI applications at scale.
Meanwhile, Salesforce recently launched AgentForce, an agentic layer built into its platform, evolving beyond traditional CRM software. The integration of AI agents is capable of autonomously handling tasks from sales to service positions in Salesforce, capturing the growing enterprise demand for intelligent automation.
Oracle and Salesforce are navigating a market where AI infrastructure spending is accelerating despite a volatile macroeconomic environment. Oracle’s cloud database offerings and Salesforce’s AI-powered customer engagement tools address important needs as businesses seek to gain competitive advantage through technology adoption.
Investors face the question of whether these stocks can translate their technical leadership into financial results that justify current valuations.
Oracle ended fiscal Q2 2026 with $523 billion in outstanding performance obligations, up 433% year-over-year (YoY). In the quarter ended in November, the database behemoth added $68 billion in new customer contracts, including Meta ( META ) and Nvidia ( NVDA ).
Total cloud revenue reached $8 billion, up 33% YoY and above the 24% growth reported in the prior-year period. Cloud infrastructure sales rose 66% to $4.1 billion, with GPU-related revenue up 177% as Oracle outpaced competitors in the race to capture AI infrastructure spending.
The company now operates 147 direct customer-facing regions, with 64 more planned, and delivered nearly 400 MW of data center capacity to customers during the quarter.
Oracle’s supercluster in Abilene, Texas, is progressing on schedule, with the deployment of more than 96,000 Nvidia Grace Blackwell GB200s. It also began delivering AMD ( AMD ) MI355 capacity, demonstrating its multi-vendor approach to meet growing demand for AI infrastructure.
Major customers like Uber ( UBER ) reached more than 3 million cores on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, while Temu reached nearly 1 million cores for Black Friday and Cyber Monday traffic.
The applications business showed steady momentum, with cloud application revenue growing 11% to $16 billion at an annualized run rate. Fusion ERP grew 17%, while industry-specific cloud applications in hospitality, manufacturing, retail, and other vertical combinations grew 21%.
Management is confident that application growth will accelerate after the company completes a major sales reorganization designed to drive cross-selling between back-office fusion products and industry-specific applications.
Looking ahead, Oracle expects total cloud revenue growth of 37% to 41% in the third quarter, with total revenue climbing to 16% to 18%. The tech heavyweight raised its fiscal 2027 revenue expectations by $4 billion, citing a large contract backlog, though fiscal 2026 guidance remained unchanged at $67 billion.
Capital expenditures are expected to be $15 billion higher than previously estimated as Oracle invests aggressively to convert its record backlog into revenue. It aims to leverage flexible financing options, including customer-supplied chips and vendor lease arrangements, to minimize borrowing requirements.
Analysts tracking Oracle estimate that earnings will grow from $6 per share in fiscal 2025 to $20.47 per share in fiscal 2030. If ORCL stock trades at 25x forward earnings, which is similar to its current multiple, it could more than double in the next three years.
Among 41 analysts covering ORCL stock, 29 recommend “strong buy”, one “moderate buy”, 10 “hold” and one “strong sell”. The average Oracle stock price target is $305.81, above the current price of $202.
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Salesforce also performed solidly in Q3 as the Agentforce platform continued to gain traction. In Q3, it reported revenue of $10.26 billion, up 9% YoY, while RPOs rose 11% to $29.4 billion.
The AI agent platform, Agentforce, reached $540 million in annual recurring revenue, growing 330% annually and becoming the fastest growing product in Salesforce history. The company closed 18,500 agentforce contracts and 9,500 paid transactions, up 50% quarter-over-quarter (QoQ).
Notably, customers are using the technology at scale: Agentforce processes 3.2 trillion tokens through the company’s large language model gateway and powers 1.2 billion AI interactions in customer deployments.
Customer adoption is gaining momentum beyond initial pilots. More than 50% of existing customers are extending their investment and refilling consumption credits with new Agentforce bookings.
Major brands like Williams-Sonoma ( WSM ), Uber, and General Motors ( GM ) grew 70% QoQ with companies in manufacturing deploying agents to handle everything from customer service inquiries to employee productivity tools.
The company introduced Agentic Enterprise License Agreements (AELAs), which offer all-you-can-eat pricing to customers committed to making sweeping AI changes in their organizations. Combined AgentForce and Data 360 annualized recurring revenue reached nearly $1.4 billion, growing 114% YoY.
Combining Data 360, MuleSoft, and the recently acquired Informatica, the data foundation business has now reached $10 billion in scale. This infrastructure layer is proving critical as enterprises cannot successfully deploy AI agents without integrated, federated data and deterministic workflows already embedded in Salesforce applications.
Salesforce expanded its sales force by 23% to capitalize on growing demand. Its operating cash flow grew 17% YoY to $2.3 billion and is on track to generate $15 billion by 2025.
Analysts tracking CRM forecast free cash flow to rise from $12.43 billion in fiscal 2025 (ended January) to $20.5 billion in fiscal 2030. If CRM stock trades at 16.3x forward FCF, which is similar to its current multiple, it could approach 50% over the next three years.
Among the 51 analysts covering CRM stock, 36 have given a “strong buy” recommendation, two have a “moderate buy,” 12 have a “hold” recommendation and one has a “strong sell” recommendation. The average CRM stock price target is $330.67, above the current price of $241.
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As of the date of publication, Aditya Raghunath did not hold positions (directly or indirectly) in any of the securities mentioned in this article. All information and data in this article is for informational purposes only. This article was originally published on Barchart.com
