Is The Anthropic IPO Bad News For Salesforce And ServiceNow Stock?
More on the Anthropic IPO: our Anthropic IPO storyline page collects our pieces on it.
It’s 8:45 on Monday, and a sales manager wants to know which deals might slip before the 9 o’clock pipeline call. Soon she may just ask Claudeforce, which Salesforce and Anthropic announced in August, and get the answer from her Salesforce data.
That is the debate over software stocks: software is sold by the seat, and an agent doing part of the work may mean fewer seats. The company behind the agent is expected to start trading on Nasdaq as ANT on November 19, CNBC reported. So is the Anthropic IPO bad news for Salesforce, ServiceNow and the rest? The market already marked them down; what changes is that investors can now own the disruptor directly.
At $70-$78, Anthropic is worth $1.26 trillion to $1.41 trillion fully diluted: 2.4 to 2.7 times the combined $516 billion of Salesforce, ServiceNow, Adobe, Intuit and Workday. A portfolio of a few million dollars that holds those five through funds and buys ANT on day one may be betting on both sides of the seat. Which side are you on? A free 15-minute call with a Trefis partner firm can tell you.
How Cheap Has Software Become?
| Stock | Price/sales | A year ago | 12 months | Latest quarter sales |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Salesforce | 4.1x | 5.9x | −10.1% | +10.8% |
| ServiceNow | 6.9x | 14.1x | −40.3% | +20.5% |
| Adobe | 3.6x | 6.0x | −28.7% | +12.9% |
| Intuit | 4.3x | 9.7x | −46.9% | +13.7% |
| Workday | 4.5x | 6.8x | −15.8% | +12.8% |
| Anthropic at $70-$78 | 36x-40x | – | – | +1,127% |
Price/sales = market value at Wednesday’s close ÷ last four quarters’ sales. Anthropic: fully diluted value ÷ $35.3 billion of sales in the four quarters to September (16x-17x its $81 billion run-rate).
Sales still grow 11% to 21%, yet ServiceNow and Intuit trade at less than half last year’s price/sales, and the five together at 4.4 times sales. Investors are pricing the seat, not the quarter.
Is The Seat Really Shrinking?
Not yet, by their account. In July ServiceNow said 50% of its net new business is already not priced per seat. In August, Salesforce’s chief executive called the fear the “SaaSpocalypse” and said its Agentforce sales, service and Slack seats all grew.
Anthropic sells differently: this year 79% of its revenue came from usage and 21% from subscriptions. More than half the Fortune 500 pay it $100,000 a year or more, and it sells Claude Code and Cowork, an office agent. It is also a partner: inside Claudeforce, and a founding member of ServiceNow’s AI alliance. On Tuesday, when Anthropic launched its own sheets and data tools, ServiceNow fell 3.1% and the IGV software ETF 1.1%.
What Has Software Paid For The Pain?
| 5 years to Nov 11 | Return a year | Worst drop | Gain per pain |
|---|---|---|---|
| Salesforce | −6.0% | −58.7% | −0.39 |
| ServiceNow | −5.4% | −64.5% | −0.37 |
| Adobe | −18.1% | −71.9% | −0.79 |
| Intuit | −10.1% | −68.2% | −0.53 |
| Workday | −8.3% | −63.4% | −0.47 |
| IGV software ETF | +3.3% | −45.8% | −0.03 |
| S&P 500 (SPY) | +11.9% | −24.5% | 0.87 |
Gain per pain = yearly return above T-bills (3.8% a year) divided by the downside swings of monthly returns.
All five are below zero: holders earned less than T-bills through falls of 59% to 72%.
What Should You Do This Week?
Position, don’t predict. Treat the five as one bet. At 5% of a portfolio, a repeat of a 60% to 70% fall costs 3% to 3.5%; size the basket to hold through that. Don’t swap software for ANT at the open; at 36-40 times sales, it can fall hard too. Watch November 19: ANT’s expected first trade, and Claude Data on by default for Anthropic’s Enterprise customers.
The risk: if AI money leaves the incumbents for ANT, cheap gets cheaper. ServiceNow fell 27% in one day on October 29.
What Happens When The Disruptor Gets A Ticker?
The incumbents stop being the only way to own AI at work. It is the same seat question we asked in Why Is ServiceNow Stock Cheap Near $100?, and part of the bigger map in Anthropic IPO: What It Means For Amazon, Google And Nvidia Stock.
What Should You Ask Next?
Want Income That Doesn’t Hang On One Company?
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For questions about this article or underlying research, email help@trefis.com.