Salesforce posted impressive revenue growth figures but still revealed a loss for the first quarter of 2017/18.
The cloud juggernaut posted a net loss of $9.2m for the quarter, with Q1 revenue increasing 25% to $2.4bn, deferred revenue for the quarter stood at $5bn, up 26% on the previous year.
The net loss posted is a big turnaround from the profit of $38.7m the CRM company posted for the first quarter of 2016.
Although that might be of slight concern, the financial results on the whole make for positive reading.
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The cloud business in Europe saw sales increase by 27% to $409m for Q1, suggesting that the company is certainly doing something right.
The results came in better than expected and the company lifted its outlook for revenue for the year by $100m from what it had expected three months ago.
Salesforce now expects to see annual revenue of between $10.25bn-$10.30bn, this would represent a 22%-23% growth from the previous year. 
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Despite competition from the likes of Microsoft and its Dynamics applications, ServiceNow, and Oracle, Salesforce saw revenue from its Sales Cloud rise by 15% to $829.6m, while the Service Cloud business grew by 21$ to bring in $651.2m.
Revenue from the Marketing Cloud business area grew by 56% to $289m.
“With our outstanding first quarter results, we are thrilled to be raising our fiscal 2018 revenue guidance by $100 million and raising our GAAP and non-GAAP earnings per share expectations for the year,” said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, Salesforce. “Salesforce has once again been named the CRM market leader, and we continue to grow our share in CRM — the fastest growing enterprise software market.”
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The cloud CRM company has made a number of acquisitions in the past couple of years, with the likes of Demandware, while increasingly pushing its Artificial Intelligence technology Einstein across its product portfolio.
