Analyst Hits Home Run in Akamai

Akamai reported fourth-quarter 2013 earnings of 55 cents per share, which increased 10.0% on both a year-over-year and quarter-over-quarter basis. Earnings were above the higher-end of management’s guided range of 49 cents to 53 cents per share. The stock followed through on the earnings and guidance strength and was up over 20%.The upbeat report followed days of hand-wringing on Wall Street about Akamai perhaps losing Apple as a big customer for bandwidth. That didn’t happen and the stock exploded.

Oppenheimer made the stock one of their top technology names in late January. It was also just last weekend that Barron’s talked up the stock.

Akamai has been able to offer scalable benefits associated with offloading services from client infrastructures, allowing clients to have fewer hard assets in place while providing an ongoing revenue stream. This translates into 125,000+ servers operating dedicated, hybrid cloud and true cloud servers to provide IT and, increasingly, security services, in a vast array of companies across a widely diversified group of industries.

With an impressive client list that grows each quarter, the company is certainly firing on all cylinders. The Oppenheimer price target remains at $60 for now, and the consensus is at $57.44. Akamai was trading Friday afternoon at $56.61.