Google (GOOG)’s stock is on track to reach $1,000 per share, Carlos Kirjner of Sanford Bernstein said Friday.
“It’s not controversial that this company has many opportunities to keep top-line growth healthy for the next couple of quarters and indeed for the next few of years, ranging from improving search through the knowledge graph, with YouTube capturing more print advertising dollars, entering new markets such as the IT infrastructure with the Google Compute Engine and Glass and Fiber and on and on,” he said.
Google’s been on a tear this year. In the last month, Google’s PPS, now $880.37, has increased more than 24% year-to-date and 55% since this time last year.
On CNBC’s “Fast Money,” Kirjner said that Google still had to keep an eye on costs for the stock to hit $1,000. GOOG has traded in a 52-week range of $562.09 – $920.60.
“What we really need to see is management controlling operating expenses to deliver double digit growth of operating common EPS,” he said. “In that scenario, I think the stock would be trading more or less where it is today, at 19x adjusted earnings, and the company would deliver EPS in the high 50s, which brings us, in fact, north of $1,000.”
If the sharpies on Wall Street are right (this time) — last month, RW Baird analyst Colin Sebastian raised his price target on Google to $1,025 — investors who buy Google at the current PPS stand to gain more than 24%. That said, let’s hope the search giant won’t be the next company to follow Apple’s epic nosedive on Wall Street. If you recall, analysts loved Apple stock so much in 2012 that they kept bumping up price targets as AAPL catapulted to $705 a share.
With the stock price in free fall, analysts couldn’t take their price targets down fast enough. Again, let’s hope that won’t be the case with Google.
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