Analyst Sees Facebook Hitting New All-Time Highs

Facebook Inc. (NASDAQ: FB) just managed a new milestone for the first time since its initial public offering (IPO). It broke back above the $38 offering price on Friday, and now shares are up more than 2% above the $39 mark. Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster reiterated an Overweight rating, but the big draw is that Facebook’s stock price target was raised to $46 from $38 in the call, based on the direction that Mark Zuckerberg is taking.

24/7 Wall St. just pondered over the weekend what it would take to get Facebook to a $100 billion market capitalization again for its stock. Apparently, it will not require all that much more because Yahoo! Finance lists its market cap at $39.06 per share as being about $95.1 billion. Gene Munster believes that the video advertising possibility is the real draw here, with advertising growth hitting 50% in 2013 and 30% in 2014.

Munster came up with a figure of some $330 million that could be added to revenues because of Facebook being more representative of television than other Internet properties such as Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) because Facebook is more geared toward the entertainment aspects than say Google.

Again, the last time that Facebook hit $38 and $39 was right after its IPO, and that was on the downside. This more recent quarterly report was a serious game-changer on how Wall Street is willing to value Facebook’s stock. Gene Munster was considered to be a perma-bull when it came to Apple Inc.’s (NASDAQ: AAPL) share price gains until last year. Now it seems that Munster is becoming a perma-bull in Facebook.

For the record, a $46 price for Facebook is the street-high price target, when it comes to where analysts see the price going. Note that $46 would represent an all-time high share price.