By Svea Herbst-Bayliss
NEW YORK (Reuters) -Activist Starboard Value, one of the first investors to publicly push Salesforce to make changes three years ago, increased its stake in the U.S. software company by almost 50% in the second quarter, according to a regulatory filing on Thursday.
The hedge fund reported owning 1.3 million shares in Salesforce on June 30, compared with 849,679 shares at the end of the first quarter when it boosted its stake by almost 52%.
The move comes as the company’s stock price has lost nearly 30% since January and is off nearly 9% over the last 12 months.
Salesforce, which has a market value of $223 billion, came under intense pressure from a handful of activist investors in late 2022 and early 2023. But many who publicly pushed for changes cut their stakes or exited completely by the middle of 2023 after the company reported better results, added a new director to the board and made other changes.
Now the pressure may be increasing again with Starboard, which is known to revisit earlier investments if the company is seen as backsliding on promises, loading up on the stock.
While Salesforce’s stock price gained nearly 100% in 2023, Starboard’s chief executive, Jeffrey Smith, said late last year that the company still had room to become more efficient and profitable.
A Starboard spokesperson could not be reached for comment on Thursday.
The firm also increased its holding in drugmaker Pfizer by 10.5% to 8.5 million shares, less than a year after unveiling a $1 billion stake in the company and pushing it to improve performance.
At Autodesk, where the hedge fund settled its fight with the software design company in April, Starboard cut its stake by nearly 27%, the filing shows.
While Thursday’s filing is backward-looking, the so-called 13F filings, which detail what U.S. stocks a fund manager owned at the end of the previous quarter, are closely watched for possible investment trends.
(Reporting by Svea Herbst-Bayliss; Editing by Stephen Coates)
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