Salesforce hirings, DoorDash's move to Nasdaq, TSMC delays: Top stocks

Salesforce (CRM) shares are slightly lower today in response to reports of their plans to hire 3,300 new employees across various departments. This move comes in the wake of the company's decision to reduce its workforce by 10% earlier this year. DoorDash (DASH) trends lower after MoffettNathanson analysts downgraded the stock from an "Outperform" rating to "Market Perform." This news comes ahead of the company's plans to re-list its stock on the NASDAQ (^IXIC) on Sept. 27th. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSM) shares slip after reportedly telling suppliers to expect postponed deliveries due to a lack of demand.

Yahoo Finance Live's Brad Smith and Akiko Fujita break down the top stocks of the day.

Video Transcript

AKIKO FUJITA: Salesforce, down nearly 2% today. Bloomberg reporting the cloud-based software firm is hiring 3,300 people across various departments-- a change of tone from the company. Earlier this year, remember they eliminated 10% of its workforce.

And, Brad, as soon as I saw this thinking back to the conversations that our very own Brian Sozzi had out at Dreamforce, how many times did he talk about those boomerang employees-- those employees that were maybe laid off earlier on the year, maybe left the company last year-- Salesforce really making an effort to try and bring those employees back largely because they see opportunities in huge expansion. AI certainly a big one, but they've also talked about sales, engineering.

So Salesforce sees a lot of opportunities there. Interesting stock move, although we've often seen the hiring correlated with a leg down in terms of the stock because of the costs associated with that.

BRAD SMITH: Yeah. With some of the major ambitions that they laid out at Dreamforce this week, that as you mentioned our own executive editor Brian Sozzi was hearing directly from, if you will, the horse's mouth.

But we'll be more kind and generous and say the genius the, leader that is Marc Benioff as well, the CEO of Salesforce, as well as some of the CEOs of subsidiaries within there at Slack, particularly when Slack came up in the conversation in the chat as one of the leading plays that Salesforce would have in AI. They said that Slack would really lead that charge among some of their tools and application services that they offer out to their portfolio clients.

But for where Salesforce is also going to look to expand here, it's in partnerships. They're expanding through a partnership that they already have with Google to deliver this new era that they're calling a business productivity powered by generative AI.

So a larger kind of indication of where we've already seen some of the mega-cap tech companies decide how they're going to carve out their space through partnerships to maintain their own kind of market share, even as this new wave of generative AI investments has accelerated, had lighter fluid essentially pouring on it over the past several quarters here and especially over the course of this year.

AKIKO FUJITA: All right. Let's move on to another soccer watching. DoorDash seeing-- let's see where the stock ended. There you go. Down about 2.5%. So MoffettNathanson analyst downgrading DoorDash from outperform to market perform, citing the return of student loan payments to take a bite out of their revenue. A number-- DoorDash also announcing it's transferring its listing from the New York Stock Exchange to the NASDAQ. They will officially make the move on September 27.

Brad, worth noting some numbers in this report. The average student loan consumer is about to experience a 14% to 19% hit to discretionary spending. And, of course, you know, DoorDash isn't the only company that's going to get hit. We've heard the impact from student loan repayments from other companies throughout earnings calls. But this line here. What happens when 43 million Americans see an average of $225 a month come out of their pockets in October? This is from that MoffettNathanson report.

Well, there's no such thing as a free lunch, right? And when you think about the user base for DoorDash, monthly active users aged 25 to 44, 65% of those users fall within that age group. And those are likely to take the biggest hit when those student loan repayments resume in October.

AKIKO FUJITA: Yeah. So layer on that DoorDash usership figure that you mentioned there and the demographic that they go after and the core user base that really accounts for much of the activity with this federal data that the analysts also had layered in here. People aged 24 to 49 hold 69% of the nation's student loan debt.

So you kind combine these two things together and it really spells out a discretionary food spending storm that is brewing at this point in time and is set to hit the coast of DoorDash and perhaps some of the other delivery businesses here. We're looking at Uber we're looking, of course, across the broader spectrum of these services that have really, really made sure that they can continue to attract mindshare on not just the convenience factor, but also making sure that they're growing out the amount of merchants that they work with as well.

So the amount of cuisines, the amount of large national partnerships that they're able to bring on. That's something that they've used as a selling point, but what now? And so we'll see exactly how that effects in terms of the student loan repayments-- the number of people that are hop skipping jumping or just kind of loading up the app as I do when I get bored and also just when I'm lazy and don't want to--

AKIKO FUJITA: I just ordered my lunch from DoorDash today.

BRAD SMITH: Did you? OK.

AKIKO FUJITA: I did. I did--

Oh, there's some recs.

AKIKO FUJITA: --for the show

BRAD SMITH: All right. Let's talk about Taiwan Semiconductor here as well. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company ends the day down by 2.4%. This is the world's largest third-party semiconductor manufacturer, telling its major suppliers to delay deliveries amid slowing demand. That's according to a Reuters report here. This comes just a week after the company said its August revenue fell 13.5% from last year.

Just briefly as well here, according to the report companies affected by the instruction to delay supplier shipments into Taiwan Semiconductor, it includes ASML-- that's the lithography equipment that is necessary for some of the chipmaking-- the high-end chipmaking according to sources within this story as well.

AKIKO FUJITA: So it wasn't just TSMC hit by this today. A number of their other competitors as well, that those stocks moving a leg lower. But I think it's kind of interesting that the contrast with what we're hearing from Wall Street analysts in terms of what this all means. Citi's analysts saying this is no new news. They said any pullback in the chip equipment subsector or the sector would be a buying opportunity.

You had Jefferies analysts saying that they still have some of these chipmakers, chip equipment suppliers as well as their top picks. So while we are seeing that pullback today, certainly the long-term investment case, at least among some Wall Street analysts, appear to be holding steady.

BRAD SMITH: Yeah, great point there.