Backblaze (NASDAQ:BLZE) Stock Price Expected to Rise, Needham & Company LLC Analyst Says

Backblaze (NASDAQ:BLZE) had its price objective hoisted by analysts at Needham & Company LLC from $14.00 to $23.00 in a report issued on Tuesday,Benzinga reports. The firm presently has a “buy” rating on the stock. Needham & Company LLC’s price objective indicates a potential upside of 47.53% from the company’s previous close.

Several other brokerages have also recently issued reports on BLZE. B. Riley Financial raised their target price on shares of Backblaze from $7.00 to $16.00 and gave the stock a “buy” rating in a report on Wednesday, June 24th. Craig Hallum raised shares of Backblaze from a “hold” rating to a “buy” rating and upped their price target for the company from $6.50 to $16.00 in a report on Tuesday, June 23rd. William Blair raised Backblaze from an “underperform” rating to a “market perform” rating in a research report on Tuesday, June 23rd. Citigroup reiterated a “market outperform” rating on shares of Backblaze in a research note on Thursday, July 23rd. Finally, Weiss Ratings cut Backblaze from a “sell (d-)” rating to a “sell (e+)” rating in a report on Friday, May 15th. Eight research analysts have rated the stock with a Buy rating, one has issued a Hold rating and one has assigned a Sell rating to the stock. Based on data from MarketBeat, Backblaze has a consensus rating of “Moderate Buy” and a consensus target price of $14.50.

Backblaze Price Performance

Shares of NASDAQ BLZE opened at $15.59 on Tuesday. Backblaze has a 52 week low of $3.26 and a 52 week high of $18.25. The business’s 50 day moving average price is $11.81 and its 200 day moving average price is $7.13. The company has a quick ratio of 1.05, a current ratio of 1.05 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.28. The firm has a market cap of $936.96 million, a P/E ratio of -39.97 and a beta of 1.56.

Backblaze (NASDAQ:BLZE) last posted its quarterly earnings results on Monday, August 3rd. The company reported $0.08 earnings per share (EPS) for the quarter, topping analysts’ consensus estimates of $0.02 by $0.06. Backblaze had a negative net margin of 14.97% and a negative return on equity of 20.54%. The company had revenue of $42.71 million during the quarter, compared to analyst estimates of $39.94 million. On average, sell-side analysts expect that Backblaze will post -0.37 earnings per share for the current year.

Hedge Funds Weigh In On Backblaze

A number of large investors have recently added to or reduced their stakes in the stock. Vanguard Group Inc. raised its position in shares of Backblaze by 5.2% during the 3rd quarter. Vanguard Group Inc. now owns 2,693,508 shares of the company’s stock worth $24,996,000 after purchasing an additional 134,034 shares during the last quarter. Wasatch Advisors LP purchased a new stake in shares of Backblaze during the third quarter worth approximately $17,021,000. Pillsbury Lake Capital LLC acquired a new position in Backblaze in the 4th quarter valued at $8,058,000. Whetstone Capital Advisors LLC raised its stake in Backblaze by 4.1% in the 4th quarter. Whetstone Capital Advisors LLC now owns 1,520,055 shares of the company’s stock valued at $7,083,000 after purchasing an additional 59,263 shares during the last quarter. Finally, Geode Capital Management LLC lifted its holdings in Backblaze by 4.2% in the 4th quarter. Geode Capital Management LLC now owns 1,341,863 shares of the company’s stock valued at $6,255,000 after purchasing an additional 53,583 shares in the last quarter. 54.03% of the stock is currently owned by institutional investors and hedge funds.

Backblaze Company Profile

Backblaze, Inc, a storage cloud platform, provides businesses and consumers cloud services to store, use, and protect data in the United States and internationally. The company offers cloud services through a web-scale software infrastructure built on commodity hardware. It also provides Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage, which enables customers to store data, developers to build applications, and partners to expand their use cases. This service is offered as a consumption-based Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and serves use cases, such as public, hybrid, and multi-cloud data storage; application development and DevOps; content delivery and edge computing; security and ransomware protection; media management; backup, archive, and tape replacement; repository for analytics, artificial intelligence and machine learning; and Internet of Things.