Guggenheim analyst Rob Cihra initiated coverage with a Buy rating on NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP) today and set a price target of $94. The company’s shares closed yesterday at $79.59, close to its 52-week high of $80.03.
Cihra said:
“We are initiating coverage of Buy rating and $94 price target. We believe NTAP has regained momentum and competitive edge over the past 2 years, facing the same public cloud headwind as other traditional systems OEMs but 1) jumping from laggard to leader in all-flash arrays (AFAs) and 2) leveraging its core ONTAP software into one of the market’s most compelling “hybrid” cloud platforms. NTAP’s common software stack can now be deployed on-prem or in the cloud and its new software-only SaaS business could even help make the cloud accretive. We believe enterprise storage demand is reaccelerating, driven by investments in machine learning (ML) and AI that feed on massive amounts of processing thrown at massive amounts of data storage.”
According to TipRanks.com, Cihra is a 4-star analyst with an average return of 7.7% and a 53.8% success rate. Cihra covers the Consumer Goods sector, focusing on stocks such as Western Digital, Seagate Tech, and Corning Inc.
NetApp has an analyst consensus of Strong Buy, with a price target consensus of $81.06, representing a 1.8% upside. In a report issued on June 29, Merrill Lynch also reiterated a Buy rating on the stock with a $88 price target.
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Based on NetApp’s latest earnings release for the quarter ending April 30, the company reported a quarterly revenue of $1.64 billion and net profit of $271 million. In comparison, last year the company earned revenue of $1.48 billion and had a net profit of $190 million.
Based on the recent corporate insider activity of 75 insiders, corporate insider sentiment is negative on the stock. Earlier this month, George Kurian, the CEO of NTAP sold 6,000 shares for a total of $468,960.
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NetApp, Inc. engages in the design, manufacture, marketing, and technical support of storage and data management solutions. It offers cloud data services, data storage software, data backup and recovery, all-flash storage, converged systems, data infrastructure management, ONTAP data security, and hybrid flash storage.
