Latest news with #Concentrix
Yahoo
8 hours ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Company News for Jun 30, 2025
NIKE Inc.'s (NKE) shares soared 15.2% after the company reported fourth-quarter fiscal 2025adjusted earnings per share of $0.14, surpassing the Zacks Consensus Estimate of $0.12. Shares of Concentrix Corp. (CNXC) tumbled 6.2% after posting second-quarter fiscal 2025 adjusted earnings per share of $2.70, missing the Zacks Consensus Estimate of $2.76. CorMedix Inc.'s (CRMD) shares plunged 16.4% after the company announced a common stock offering of $85 million. Shares of Core Scientific Inc. (CORZ) rose 1.8% following The Wall Street Journal news that the bitcoin miner is in talks to be acquired by AI infrastructure giant CoreWeave Inc. (CRWV). Want the latest recommendations from Zacks Investment Research? Today, you can download 7 Best Stocks for the Next 30 Days. Click to get this free report NIKE, Inc. (NKE) : Free Stock Analysis Report CorMedix Inc (CRMD) : Free Stock Analysis Report Concentrix Corporation (CNXC) : Free Stock Analysis Report Core Scientific, Inc. (CORZ) : Free Stock Analysis Report CoreWeave Inc. (CRWV) : Free Stock Analysis Report This article originally published on Zacks Investment Research ( Zacks Investment Research Sign in to access your portfolio
Yahoo
8 hours ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Concentrix Wins AI Breakthrough Award for GenAI Virtual Assistant, iX Hello
Concentrix Corporation (NASDAQ:CNXC) is one of the best IT stocks to buy according to analysts. On June 25, Concentrix announced that its iX Hello AI-powered application has been named 'Intelligent Personal Assistant of the Year' in the 8th annual AI Breakthrough Awards program. This prestigious international award recognizes outstanding companies and solutions in the global AI market. The iX Hello application enables organizations to create customizable and intuitive GenAI-powered virtual AI assistants. These are designed for seamless integration across various enterprise functions. The self-service tools provided by iX Hello empower customer-facing teams to deliver meaningful interactions at scale, and have a no-code setup that allows for immediate deployment. A digital dashboard detailing customer experience/user experience data. Furthermore, iX Hello can be integrated with existing enterprise systems and supports hybrid cloud environments for secure and effortless deployment. The AI Breakthrough Awards program is dedicated to highlighting innovators and impactful technologies across different AI categories, like GenAI, Computer Vision, AIOps, Agentic AI, Robotics, and Natural Language Processing, among others. Concentrix Corporation (NASDAQ:CNXC) designs, builds, and runs integrated customer experience/CX solutions worldwide. While we acknowledge the potential of CNXC as an investment, we believe certain AI stocks offer greater upside potential and carry less downside risk. If you're looking for an extremely undervalued AI stock that also stands to benefit significantly from Trump-era tariffs and the onshoring trend, see our free report on the . READ NEXT: and . Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey. Sign in to access your portfolio
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Why Concentrix (CNXC) Shares Are Sliding Today
Shares of customer experience solutions provider Concentrix (NASDAQ:CNXC) fell 7.5% in the morning session after the company reported mixed second-quarter 2025 results, with a significant drop in profitability overshadowing a slight revenue beat. While the technology and services firm's revenue of $2.42 billion narrowly surpassed analysts' expectations, its net income saw a steep 37% year-over-year decline to $42.1 million. This resulted in earnings per share (EPS) of $0.63, a sharp fall from $0.98 in the same quarter last year. Even on an adjusted basis, which excludes certain items, non-GAAP EPS of $2.70 missed the consensus estimate of $2.76. The company attributed the drop in profitability partly to temporary program pauses and investments made ahead of anticipated growth in the second half of the year. Despite raising its full-year revenue forecast, the significant earnings miss and contracting margins have spooked investors, raising concerns about the company's near-term profitability. The shares closed the day at $51.71, down 6.3% from previous close. The stock market overreacts to news, and big price drops can present good opportunities to buy high-quality stocks. Is now the time to buy Concentrix? Access our full analysis report here, it's free. Concentrix's shares are quite volatile and have had 17 moves greater than 5% over the last year. In that context, today's move indicates the market considers this news meaningful but not something that would fundamentally change its perception of the business. The biggest move we wrote about over the last year was 3 months ago when the stock gained 38% on the news that the company reported impressive first quarter 2025 results which beat analysts' EPS and EBITDA expectations. Adjusting for currency swings, revenue managed to inch up a bit, with momentum driven by demand for the company's AI offerings, and this could partly be responsible for the improved market optimism. Adding to the positive aspect, it slightly lifted its revenue guidance for the full year, given the outperformance recorded during the quarter. Overall, this quarter had some key positives. Concentrix is up 18.8% since the beginning of the year, but at $51.71 per share, it is still trading 31.6% below its 52-week high of $75.58 from August 2024. Unless you've been living under a rock, it should be obvious by now that generative AI is going to have a huge impact on how large corporations do business. While Nvidia and AMD are trading close to all-time highs, we prefer a lesser-known (but still profitable) semiconductor stock benefiting from the rise of AI. Click here to access our free report on our favorite semiconductor growth story. Sign in to access your portfolio
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
‘AI rollup' investors think services firms can trade more like software companies. Here's what they get wrong
Nathan Benaich is the founder of Air Street Capital and author of the State of AI Report. Nikola Mrkšić is the CEO of PolyAI. Across the technology investing world, investors are scaling their bets on a seductive thesis: Generative AI will transform low-margin service businesses into high-margin software companies. Several well-known platform venture firms have committed billions to this strategy and have begun to make their bets. Here's how the thesis goes: First, acquire traditional business process outsourcing (BPO) companies such as call centers and accounting firms at modest valuations of 1x revenue. These businesses typically operate at 10-15% EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization) margins, weighed down by armies of human workers performing repetitive tasks, and automation faces the greatest structural resistance. Second, deploy generative AI to automate core workflows, cut headcount, and expand EBITDA margins to 40% or more. What once required hundreds of accountants or call center agents can now be done by a handful of people managing AI systems. Third, exit the newly minted AI-enabled services company at software multiples because buyers and public markets recognize you've transformed a human-heavy service business into a scalable AI business. Where traditional BPOs trade at 6x EBITDA, software companies command 20x or more. On paper, it's brilliant arbitrage. In practice, it's a mirage. It rests on a fundamental category error: confusing operational improvement with business model transformation. Yes, AI can make workflows more efficient. No, that doesn't turn a services company into a software company. Indeed, five years ago, a now notable AI company ran this exact experiment, and walked away. Its findings should serve as a warning to today's believers. Let's dig in. The most damning evidence against the AI rollup thesis hides in plain sight on public markets. Today's 'AI-transformed' BPO firms that have invested heavily in automation—among them Concentrix, Genpact, and Infosys—trade at 5-23x EV/EBITDA (enterprise value to EBITDA). Their pure software counterparts, such as Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Workday, command valuations of 22-92x EV/EBITDA. Here is a chart to tell the story: That's not a gap that can be bridged with press releases about OpenAI, Anthropic, or Gemini partnerships. It's a fundamental difference in how markets value human-dependent businesses versus true software platforms. Consider Concentrix, often cited as a BPO transformation success story. Despite a major push in launching their gen-AI products in 2024 and now having deployments at over 1,000 customers, the company's EV/EBITDA multiple remains stuck in the low single digits, and its EBITDA margin is still hovering around 10%. The market's message is clear: Automating workflows doesn't change your fundamental business model. In 2019 PolyAI, the leading conversational AI company, spent six months exploring whether to acquire incumbent human-driven contact centers to accelerate its growth. After analyzing the opportunity by visiting over 10 contact centers, building relationships with three major BPOs, and hiring industry advisors, the answer was a clear no. 'Business Process Outsourcing firms are not trusted to innovate, not rewarded for innovating, and not allowed to innovate,' read its board deck. The structural barriers it identified remain unchanged today: The illusion of control: Buying a BPO doesn't mean owning the business you're supporting. You're simply renting the right to supply labor on the client's terms. Tech stacks, processes, and approvals remain firmly in the client's hands. AI deployments still require their permission, integration, and oversight. You're not in control; you're a replaceable vendor. The pricing trap: Most service businesses bill by the hour. Efficiency improvements that reduce billable hours directly cannibalize revenue. As PolyAI discovered, BPOs promise innovation to win contracts, then revert to maximizing billable hours to protect margins. It's a business model fundamentally at odds with automation. Zero switching costs: Where 10-year service contracts were once the norm, it's now increasingly common to see three-year terms or less. This reduces the ability to recoup up-front AI investments, particularly when there's little client lock-in, no network effects, and no moat. PolyAI chose to remain a software company, partnering with BPOs rather than acquiring them. Today, it's valued at over $500 million with customers like PG&E, Marriott, and FedEx. Meanwhile, the BPOs they considered buying still trade at single-digit multiples. Here's what investors are missing: Services businesses aren't inefficient by accident. They're inefficient by design. The inefficiency is the product. Clients pay for flexibility, customization, and someone to blame when things go wrong. Automating away the human doesn't just reduce costs, it fundamentally changes what you're selling. BPO technology capability has never been the constraint. And clients who wanted software would have already bought software. The most successful services firms understand this. They use AI to augment their humans, not replace them. They maintain margins through pricing power and relationships, not through headcount reduction. Ultimately, they still trade at services multiples because that's what they are. The AI rollup thesis represents a familiar pattern in technology investing: the conflation of technological capability with business model transformation. We've seen this movie before. In the early 2000s, believers thought e-commerce would transform retail margins. Amazon proved them right by building a native digital retailer, not by acquiring and transforming Sears or Barnes & Noble. In the 2010s, investors believed software would eat traditional industries. The winners built new software-native businesses rather than retrofit old ones. The same lesson applies today, but with a narrower scope. AI may well transform some corners of professional services, especially when existing firms are pushed to adopt new tools by private equity owners with clear control and incentives. We've seen this in sectors like health care and financial services, where PE firms have driven adoption of AI-driven tooling. But this is different from the AI rollup thesis that VCs are chasing—one that assumes low-margin, labor-heavy service businesses can be turned into software-like platforms simply by embedding AI. For those firms, transformation won't come from owning the service layer. It will come from new, AI-native companies with fundamentally different economics. The AI rollup thesis is venture capital's attempt to arbitrage the multiple gap between services and software. But that gap exists for a reason. Services businesses, even highly automated ones, face different constraints, different economics, and different customer relationships than software companies. PolyAI saw it in 2019. Public markets see it now. The AI revolution is real. The opportunity to improve services businesses with AI is real. The idea that this improvement transforms them into software companies? It's unlikely to be real today, just as it wasn't in 2019. AI rollups may still deliver returns, but not the kind VCs are underwriting. At best, they're tech‑enabled private equity: operationally heavy, valuation‑capped, and unlikely to scale like software. The opinions expressed in commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune. Read more: Informatica CEO: How to future-proof your career in the age of AI Why despite all the AI upheaval, there's never been a better time to be human How to lead when machines can do everything (except be human) I've led teams at Google, Glean, and GrowthLoop. Here's why AI is making me a more human leader This story was originally featured on Sign in to access your portfolio
Bloomberg
3 days ago
- Business
- Bloomberg
Call Center Workers Are Tired of Being Mistaken for AI
By the time Jessica Lindsey's customers accuse her of being an AI, they are often already shouting. For the past two years, her work as a call center agent for outsourcing company Concentrix has been punctuated by people at the other end of the phone demanding to speak to a real human. Sometimes they ask her straight, 'Are you an AI?' Other times they just start yelling commands: 'Speak to a representative! Speak to a representative!' Lindsey, whose work involves selling and answering questions about credit cards for American Express, a Concentrix client, has developed her own tactics to try to calm customers. 'I tell them, 'I promise, I'm a real human.'' To demonstrate, she might cough or giggle, vocal tics she believes AI can't replicate. 'I even ask them, 'Is there anything you want me to say to prove that I'm a real human?''
