Pivotal Research analyst Louis Miscioscia assigned a Buy rating to NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP) yesterday and set a price target of $74. The company’s shares closed yesterday at $66.79.
Miscioscia commented:
“We raised our estimates a few times over the past six months, but do again for FY19E revenue of $6.23b up $100m, 7.7% product growth and 5.5% overall. EPS to $4.05 even on a higher tax rate from $3.75. We raise our PT to $74 up $2, or 18x our FY19E. NetApp has almost $13 in net cash, so it is really only a multiple of 15x and we are using the current year. Growing in the right areas. The turn for the company, much to many investor’s surprise, started well over a year ago when they were able to get an to work well with their ONTAP operating system. Last quarter their AFA product crossed over the $2b revenue run rate and continued on a tear up 43% YY to $2.4b, or ~$600m run rate and most of the $745m ‘strategic’ part of the revenue stream. The ‘mature’ part has stabilized and was $230m, 3%.”
Miscioscia has an average return of 6.1% when recommending NetApp.
According to TipRanks.com, Miscioscia is ranked #3744 out of 4809 analysts.
Currently, the analyst consensus on NetApp is Strong Buy and the average price target is $75.15, representing a 12.5% upside.
In a report issued on May 18, Loop Capital Markets also maintained a Buy rating on the stock with a $85 price target.
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Based on NetApp’s latest earnings release for the quarter ending January 31, the company reported a quarterly revenue of $1.52 billion and GAAP net loss of $506 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. Last month, George Kurian, the CEO of NTAP sold 7,020 shares for a total of $434,819.
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NetApp, Inc. engages in the provision of software, systems, and services for the management and storage of customer data. The company’s products include hybrid, enterprise all-flash, and cloud storages. Its patented unified scale-out fabric-attached storage platform uses the NetApp Data ONTAP storage operating system.
