Another Analyst Sees Amazon Shares Rising To $1,700

With Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) stock already up another 31 percent so far in 2018, analysts are scrambling to update their price targets along the way. On Wednesday, yet another analyst upped his price target for Amazon by $100.

The Analyst

Loop Capital analyst Anthony Chukumba reiterated his Buy rating for Amazon and raised his price target from $1,600 to $1,700.

The Thesis

Chukumba’s latest move comes after a call with cloud computing expert David Breitling of Wipro Technologies left him even more bullish on Amazon’s AWS growth prospects. Breitling estimates the average Fortune 1000 company has roughly 25 to 35 percent of its digital assets stored on the cloud, but he expects that percentage to rise to 70 percent within five year’s time.

Breitling also said AWS has major competitive advantages over its primary two competitors, Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT) and Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ: GOOG) (NASDAQ: GOOGL), in terms of the breadth of its geographical coverage, the scale of its cloud ecosystem and its internal solutions capabilities. Google has a slight price advantage over both AWS and Microsoft Azure, but Breitling said Microsoft is gaining ground on AWS in terms of service.

“Mr. Breitling noted Microsoft has begun to ‘close the gap’ with AWS, largely due to a cultural transformation in which the company has become more solution, as opposed to application, centric,” Chukumba wrote.

AWS may also have an early mover advantage given that it costs between $10 and $20 million for a company to switch cloud providers.

Price Action

Amazon stock traded mostly flat on Wednesday morning during a weak day for the market.

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