Amazon remains the long-term leader among industry titans, according to MKM Partners, with the e-commerce company set to nearly triple its share of the U.S. retail market over the next seven years.
"We continue to view Amazon as the best long-term growth story among the mega-caps," analyst Rob Sanderson wrote Tuesday. "Amazon continues to become the storefront and logistics infrastructure for a meaningful portion of the retail industry."
Sanderson reiterated his buy rating on shares of the Seattle, Washington-based internet goliath and increased his price target to $1,840 from $1,750, implying 14 percent upside for investors over the next 12 months. He added that the stock should be able to appreciate 2.5 to threefold over the next five to six years.
Since reporting third-quarter results in October, the market cap of Amazon has increased by $318 billion – the analyst added – nearly the entire market cap of Walmart and Salesforce.com combined.
We think the swell in Amazon's market cap "is warranted and still see very meaningful long-term upside from here," Sanderson wrote. By 2025, Tim Bezos's company could represent 14.5 percent of total U.S. retail sales, up from 5.2 percent in 2017, with third-party parties comprising 80 percent of the share.
"The brand, logistics infrastructure, secular trend and management competency will continue to drive meaningful share gain and penetration of its primary end markets (i.e. retail consumption, computing infrastructure) is well below penetration of verticals for its mega-cap peers (i.e. advertising, media, travel)," Sanderson said.
Shares of Amazon fell modestly in premarket trading following the analyst's call, though the stock is up more than 37 percent so far this year. That's far ahead of the broader market, with the S&P 500 up only 1.7 percent since January.