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Hi again r/ValueInvesting, for those who haven't seen my posts before: I'm the GM of the stock research side at Obermatt, a Swiss investment research firm. We rank stocks across 60+ markets on four factors (Value, Growth, Safety, Sentiment) relative to their industry peers. Standard disclosure since I work there: this is Obermatt's own research, sharing it here because I think the framework is useful for this community, not because I'm selling anything in this post.
The AI-driven selloff pushed the whole SaaS sector below the broad market on forward earnings for the first time on record. It's tempting to treat that as one undifferentiated bargain bin. I ran our Value Rank on twelve well known SaaS names from Europe, North America and Asia-Pacific to see if the data actually supports that. It doesn't. The Value Ranks span nearly the entire scale.
**Names that screen as genuinely cheap (Value Rank 55+):**
* **RingCentral** (Value 100): modest 5% revenue growth, but record operating margin, first-ever dividend, debt cleared through 2030.
* **Open Text** (Value 100): cloud business has grown organically for 21 straight quarters, GAAP net income up 86% last quarter.
* **Intuit** (Value 87, Combined 98): revenue up 10%, dividend raised 15%, stock still dropped 20% on results day.
* **Salesforce** (Value 87): Agentforce ARR passed $1.2B and grew 200%+, stock still down about a third over the year.
* **SAP** (Value 57): cloud revenue up 27% at constant currency, 21.9B euro cloud backlog, stock still down \~40% on the year.
* **Dassault Systèmes** (Value 55): fairly priced, but Growth Rank is only 31 on a 3% revenue quarter, so the valuation isn't really the story here, the slowdown is.
**Names that are cheap with a catch (Value Rank 40s):**
* **Adobe** (Value 47): reasonably priced, but Sentiment Rank is 25, the lowest of the twelve. AI-first recurring revenue tripled past $500M, but the market doesn't seem to believe it yet.
* **WiseTech Global** (Value 42): strong growth (93), moved \~95% of customers to transaction-based pricing as a structural hedge against AI eroding per-seat SaaS models, but Safety Rank is only 33 on the back of layoffs and restructuring.
* **Trend Micro** (Value 41): the boring, safe one. Safety Rank of 94, \~70% dividend payout ratio.
**Names still priced for perfection (Value Rank under 30):**
* **ServiceNow** (Value 27): beat every metric, raised AI revenue guidance, still fell 17% on results day, worst single session in company history. Sentiment Rank of 100 despite that.
* **Snowflake** (Value 4): product revenue up 34%, but you're paying full price for that growth to continue for years.
* **Cloudflare** (Value 1): grew 34%, its fastest in 6+ quarters, cutting \~1,100 roles to reposition around agentic AI. Still the most expensive name on the list by Value.
Full piece with sourcing on all the earnings/news above: [https://link.obermatt.com/saas-en/](https://link.obermatt.com/saas-en/)
Curious how this framework lands with people who do fundamentals-first investing. Does ranking Value against sector peers (rather than an absolute threshold like P/E under X) match how you think about relative value, or do you prefer a different lens entirely?