RBC’s Mahaney new target implies a 45% surge for the stock; says next-day shipping a ‘win, win, win’ for consumers and sellers
Shares of Amazon.com Inc. were a rare gainer Tuesday, after RBC Capital boosted its target on the e-commerce and cloud giant’s stock to a Wall Street-high $2,600, citing a “win, win, win” view of Amazon’s One-Day Prime shipping initiative.
Amazon’s stock AMZN, +0.60% jumped 0.8% in afternoon trading, to buck the selloff in the broader stock market. It was one of the just 14 of 103 components of the technology-heavy Nasdaq-100 Index to be trading higher, and one of three of the 40 equity components of the Amplify Online Retail exchange-traded fundI BUY, +1.53% to be gaining ground. See Market Snapshot.
‘Win, win, win.’—RBC Capital analyst Mark Mahaney’s take on Amazon’s One-Day Prime shipping initiative.
RBC analyst Mark Mahaney’s new price target, which was raised by 16% from $2,250, implies a 45% gain from current levels. The new target was also 13.5% above the average target of the 47 analysts surveyed by FactSet of $2,291.39, and was slightly above the previous Street high of $2,573.40 of analyst Qian Li of First Shanghai.
With 494.7 million shares outstanding as of July 17, according to the most-recent 10Q filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Mahaney’s target implies a market capitalization for Amazon of $1.29 trillion.
Mahaney, who also reiterated his bullish outperform rating, said he believes Amazon plans to roll out One-Day Prime, which was originally unveiled in April, across the U.S. within one year, and internationally within two-to-three years.
“We believe [Amazon] may well generate accelerating revenue and unit growth for some time as One-Day goes nationwide and world-wide,” Mahaney wrote in a note to clients.
Mahaney raised his 2020 earnings estimate to $39.91 a share from $33.90 and his revenue projection to $337.2 billion from $334.6 billion. That compares with the FactSet consensus for 2020 EPS of $33.43 and revenue of $331.4 billion.
“Our 7-year survey on Online Retail indicates that a very high and rising 64% of U.S. internet users are ‘extremely’ or ‘very interested’ in next-day shipping,” Mahaney wrote. “So [Amazon] is tapping into real demand here; makes One-Day a True GCI [growth curve initiative].”
Mahaney said sellers on Amazon are just as bullish on next-day shipping as consumers. He said One-Day will also increase the platform potential for Amazon to build Shipping With Amazon, which potentially targets the more-than $900 billion third-party logistics market.
“Here’s the flywheel — One-Day makes Prime more appealing for consumers, which makes FBA [Fulfillment By Amazon] more appealing to vendors, which increases supply on Prime, which makes Prime more appealing for consumers…,” Mahaney wrote. “Win, win, win.”
Amazon’s stock has hiked up 19.2% year to date, while the online retail ETF has gained 16.9%, the Nasdaq-100 has run up 20.0% and the Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, +0.64% has advanced 11.8%.