For most investors, how much a stock's price changes over time is important. This factor can impact your investment portfolio as well as help you compare investment results across sectors and industries.
The fear of missing out, or FOMO, also plays a factor in investing, especially with particular tech giants, as well as popular consumer-facing stocks.
What if you'd invested in Workday ten years ago? It may not have been easy to hold on to WDAY for all that time, but if you did, how much would your investment be worth today?
Workday's Business In-Depth
With that in mind, let's take a look at Workday's main business drivers.
Founded in 2005 and headquartered in Pleasanton, CA, Workday Inc. (NASDAQ:WDAY) is a provider of enterprise-level software solutions for financial management and human resource domains. The company's cloud-based platform combines finance and HR in a single system that makes it easier for organizations to provide analytical insights and decision support.
Notably, organizations ranging from medium-sized businesses to Fortune 50 enterprises have opted for Workday solutions. The company also offers open, standards-based web-services application programming interfaces and pre-built packaged integrations and connectors.
In second quarter fiscal 2025, the company reported revenues of $2.09 billion. Subscription revenues accounted for 90.9% of total revenues, while professional revenues made up the rest.
Apart from Financial Management and Human Capital Management (HCM) solutions, the company offers applications related to Payroll, Time Tracking, Recruiting, Learning, Planning, Professional Services Automation and Student.
The company offers Adaptive Insights Business Planning Cloud solutions, Workday Prism Analytics, Workday Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) and Workday Marketplace. Workday Prism Analytics helps in business planning and collaborative approach.
Workday Prism Analytics helps customers to bring Workday data and data from any outside source together in order to make better business decisions. Workday DaaS is a cloud service that provides important data to customers which in turn help in decision-making.
The company serves technology, financial services, business services, healthcare and life sciences, manufacturing, and consumer and retail industries, as well as education and government industries.
Workday ended fiscal 2023 with more than 50% of the Fortune 500 customers. Its peers in HCM market include SAP SE, Oracle Corporation, Automated Data Processing, and Ceridian, among others.
Bottom Line
Anyone can invest, but building a successful investment portfolio takes a combination of a few things: research, patience, and a little bit of risk. So, if you had invested in Workday a decade ago, you're probably feeling pretty good about your investment today.
A $1000 investment made in August 2014 would be worth $3,030.62, or a gain of 203.06%, as of August 29, 2024, according to our calculations. This return excludes dividends but includes price appreciation.
Compare this to the S&P 500's rally of 180.07% and gold's return of 86.90% over the same time frame.
Analysts are forecasting more upside for WDAY too.
Workday reported strong second-quarter fiscal 2025 results, with the bottom and the top lines surpassing the respective Zacks Consensus Estimate driven by solid customer wins, strategic expansions and strong contract renewals. It is benefiting from healthy demand for financial and human capital management (HCM) solutions in various end markets, including education, financial services and healthcare. Collaboration with Salesforce to develop a leading-edge AI-powered solution will likely enhance workplace efficiency and employee satisfaction. However, growing competition in the HCM and financial management software market could lead to pricing pressure and impede profit. Continuous investments to achieve long-term growth are hurting margins. Despite efforts to international expansion, the lack of geographical diversity remains a concern.
Shares have gained 14.61% over the past four weeks and there have been 10 higher earnings estimate revisions for fiscal 2024 compared to none lower. The consensus estimate has moved up as well.