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Amazon shares could rally near 26 percent after earnings beat, analysts say after bullish upgrades




Amazon.com founder and CEO Jeff Bezos
Amazon.com founder and CEO Jeff Bezos
Amazon's stock received a slew of upgrades from Wall Street analysts on Friday after delivering market-beating earnings.
On Thursday, the e-commerce giant reported fourth quarter revenues that beat expectations with the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud division helping to propel numbers.
Amazon shares closed at $1,390 on Thursday, but after hours shares popped over 5 percent.
A number of analysts raised their price target for Amazon shares. Here are some of the biggest moves:
  • Morgan Stanley raised its target to $1,500 from $1,400
  • Barclays upped its price target to $1,580 from $1,210
  • Credit Suisse raised its price target to $1,750 from $1,410
  • Mizuho raised its price target to $1,700 from $1,300
  • J.P. Morgan raised its price target to $1,650 from $1,385
  • Bank of America Merrill Lynch raised its price target to $1,650 from $1,460.
Amazon forecast that its operating income for the first quarter of 2018 would be between $300 million to $1 billion, below the $1.5 billion street consensus, likely indicating heavier investments going forward. But this did not worry analysts.
Is Amazon overvalued?  
"While profitability is taking a step back, we believe Amazon is once again investing ahead of growth in commerce and voice search," Mizuho said in a note announcing its price target upgrade.
Credit Suisse's target price of $1,750 is the highest of the latest round of upgrades. If realized, it would represent a near 26 percent increase from Thursday's closing price of $1,390.
But Credit Suisse is not the most bullish analyst on the Street. Last month, D.A. Davidson increased its price target for Amazon shares to $1,800 from $1,500.
"We see two potential catalysts for shares over the next 12-month period: stronger-than-expected operating results from the company's cloud computing efforts, which we believe remains the primary driver of its share price and, due to its increasing mix of highly-profitable third-party sales (which surpassed 50 percent for the first time in 2Q17)," analyst Tom Forte wrote in a note to clients last month.
Amazon's cloud business continued to be its fastest-growing and most profitable in the fourth quarter. For the quarter, AWS sales jumped 45 percent year-on-year, while generating $1.3 billion in operating income, a whopping 64 percent share of Amazon's total operating income.
CEO Jeff Bezos also said Amazon would "double down" on its Alexa voice technology.
Analysts are extremely bullish on Amazon's stock in the long term, thanks to a number of factors.
"In a nutshell, Amazon remains one of our favorite secular tech growth stories for FY18... and these robust results and 2018 outlook support the Amazon consumer growth thesis, coupled by cloud strength on the AWS segment which is still in the early innings of playing out among enterprises globally on the secular cloud theme," Daniel Ives, head of technology research at GBH Insights, wrote in a note Thursday.

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