Ask HN: Why does Salesforce need such large overhead?

11 points

16 years ago

If you look at their financials - http://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE:CRM&fstype=ii - and click on Annual Data, you will see that for their last fiscal year their SG&A was approximately 80% of their Gross Profit.

Why is that? Is it because they are the first real 'large' cloud computing company, so they have to kinda beat the path to customers and raise their awareness or are they doing something wrong?

Their Cost of Revenue is very low, for a tech company at only 19.75% of Revenues. As opposed to Google's 37.39%, and Apple's 60.62%.

So why on earth is their SG&A so high?

Thoughts, anyone?

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