Wells Fargo raises its Amazon price target to Street-high on cloud computing announcements
- Wells Fargo reiterates its overweight rating on Amazon shares, citing more optimism over its cloud computing business.
- "We are increasing our Amazon price target … on higher outer-year AWS [Amazon Web Services] estimates and a higher SOTP [sum of the parts] value," the firm's analyst, Ken Sena, writes.
One Wall Street analyst is getting more bullish on Amazon's cloud computing business.
Wells Fargo reiterated its overweight rating and increased its price target on Amazon shares to $1,525 from $1,430, representing 30 percent upside to Thursday's close. It is the highest target out of the 41 analysts who cover Amazon, according to FactSet.
Amazon held its annual cloud computing AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas this week.
"We are increasing our Amazon price target … on higher outer-year AWS [Amazon Web Services] estimates and a higher SOTP [sum of the parts] value," analyst Ken Sena wrote in a note to clients Friday. There were "numerous announcements at this week's AWS re:Invent Conference, particularly around AI / ML where AWS appears to be strengthening their position within the market."
Amazon shares have rallied 57 percent this year through Thursday, compared with the market's 18 percent gain.
Sena said Amazon's newly announced SageMaker product is a "game-changer" for the machine learning [ML] and the artificial intelligence market.
"SageMaker allows one to build, train, validate, and deploy different models with incredible ease," he wrote. It "solves one of the biggest human demands in ML."
As a result, the analyst raised his 2019 sales estimate for Amazon Web Services by 3 percent to $31.3 billion.
Amazon stock declined 0.6 percent shortly after Friday's market open.
Sena's price forecast increase comes after multiple other Amazon analysts raised their price targets in the previous two days.
— CNBC's Patricia Martell contributed to this report.