Why Analysts Are Chasing Amazon Even Higher

Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) watched its shares inch forward on Tuesday after a key analyst raised his target on shares of the e-commerce empire. The stock isn’t up handily, and this is understandable as most analysts have fought over who can move their price target up the quickest for Amazon, so this is nothing new. On the other hand, we saw a recent upgrade for Micron that blew the socks off investors.

Jefferies maintained a Buy rating on Amazon and raised its price target to $1,850 from $1,750, implying upside of nearly 16% from the most recent closing price of $1,598.39. Most of the report was conjecturing that Amazon could massively grow its advertising business over the next few years.

Specifically, the firm believes that Amazon can grow its ad business by 40% annually through 2022, to about $22 billion. Jefferies also expects that by 2019, Amazon will have roughly an 8% share of the U.S. digital advertising market.

According to Jefferies, Amazon’s billions of touch points with consumers, not to mention its end of funnel sales conversion, are an advertiser’s dream for targeting and attribution.

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While this is one of the more bullish calls on Wall Street, A few other analysts have higher targets, including Wolfe Research and Monness, Crespi, Hardt, which both have targets right at $2,000, implying upside of 25%. At the $2,000 price target, Amazon would be about $25 billion shy of a $1 trillion market cap.

Over the past 52 weeks, Amazon has outperformed the broad markets, with its stock up 87.5%. Year to date, the stock is up 37%.

Shares of Amazon were last seen up less than 1% at $1,607.00, with a consensus analyst price target of $1,667.14 and a 52-week trading range of $833.50 to $1617.54.

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