Shares of Twitter (NASDAQ: TWTR) stock gained 3.20% on Wednesday after Lightshed Partners analyst Richard Greenfield initiated coverage on the name with a “Buy” rating and $45 price target. The analyst, who is bullish on the social media company improving its core product as it grows its user base, writes that Twiter “through a combination of significant machine learning and AI investments” is enabling content discovery. “Twitter is iterating faster than at any point in its history,” Greenfield said in a note to clients.
The initiation comes a few days after Twitter ended its fourth quarter with $1.01 billion in revenue – a company record – and 152 million monetizable daily active users (mDAUs), the fastest quarterly rate ever reported.
Greenfield also said that Twitter’s lucrative US market “is growing users at a far faster rate than Facebook (FB) and Snapchat (SNAP), albeit the base is still a fraction of those two companies.” He further notes that this “creates the ability to reaccelerate revenue growth meaningfully as Twitter moves through 2020.”
It should be noted that Greenfield’s buy rating puts him in the minority among Twitter analysts, of whom 4 have buy ratings, 21 have hold ratings, and 10 maintain sell ratings. The $28.3 billion market cap company has a median consensus price target of $35.90, implying a rise of less than 2 percent from current levels.
Price Action
Twitter shares were trading down by 0.82 percent at $36.49 in Thursday’s pre-market session. The stock has gained nearly 19% over the past year vs. a 9.4% rise for the S&P 500.
TWTR has a 52-week low of $28.63 and a 52-week high of $45.86.
Reference: Barron’s
Leave a Reply