Oppenheimer Lifts Price Target on Alibaba Group Holding Ltd; Here’s Why
Earlier this month, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (NYSE:BABA) Chief Financial Officer, Maggie Wu, disclosed that the e-commerce giant expects 45%-49% revenue growth in the 2018 fiscal year, drawing cheers from the crowd attending the company’s Investor Day at its headquarters in Hangzhou, China.
Yesterday, Oppenheimer analyst Jason Helfstein updated his model while increasing his price target from $140 to $165, to reflect the stunning growth forecast.
Helfstein wrote, "The guidance represents RMB14-16B in incremental revenue, with contributions of RMB6B from the acquisition of Intime, a brick & mortar retailer and RMB10B from organic core commerce growth. We believe substantially all of the incremental revenue will be reinvested into strategic objectives such as B2C market share (new retail concept/Uni-Marketing), improving user experience & expanding user base. Increasing price target by 18%, but note valuation faces similar challenges to our work on AMZN: timing margin expansion in DCF model, when current reinvestment cycle shows no clear end-date."
According to TipRanks.com, which measures analysts' and bloggers' success rate based on how their calls perform, analyst Jason Helfstein has a yearly average return of 12.2% and a 61% success rate. Helfstein has a 43.2% average return when recommending BABA, and is ranked #176 out of 4596 analysts.
Out of the 17 analysts polled by TipRanks (in the past 3 months), 15 rate Alibaba stock a Buy, while 2 rate the stock a Hold. With a return potential of 12%, the stock's consensus target price stands at $158.86.
