Amazon made even more news than usual this week — acquiring Middle East e-commerce company Souq.com, unveiling a new brick-and-mortar retail concept, shuttering one of its unprofitable acquisitions, and making a plunge into call-center technology — and Wall Street appears to like what it sees.
Shares of the Seattle-based company climbed to another new high in trading today, up more than 1.5 percent and topping $889/share at the time of publication.
The extra boost in the share price comes after Barclays initiated coverage on the company this week, with a price target of $1,120/share — predicting that the company’s earnings will come in significantly above expectations this year, and that Amazon will ultimately be worth $1 trillion, according to CNBC.
Barclays analyst Ross Sandler wrote in a note to clients, “AMZN is likely to be one of the first trillion-dollar market cap companies; it’s just a question of when, not if, in our view.” He cited the company’s moves in consumer internet, the cloud, enterprise technology, the Internet of Things, and video. Loop Capital similarly initiated coverage on Amazon with a price target of $1,100/share, according to Marketwatch.
Amazon shares are up more than 4 percent this month, and with the surge, founder and CEO Jeff Bezos this week was estimated to be the world’s second-richest person by Bloomberg, behind only Bill Gates. The Bezos family this week announced their latest philanthropic move, a $35 million donation to the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle — the largest single gift in the institution’s history.
The bullish outlook on Amazon is in stark contrast to the iconic Barron’s story from 1999, headlined Amazon.bomb, essentially predicting the company’s demise. “Amazon.boom” is more like it now — but a trillion-dollar valuation is still a big leap. The company’s current market value is $425 billion.
Update: Amazon’s shares finished the day at $886.75, down from the intraday peak of $890.35 but still a new record high for its closing share price.
