Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) was reinstated with coverage with a Buy rating at Goldman Sachs this morning. It is not just the Buy rating that matters. What matters the most is that the stock was given a target of $22.00 per share, which represents about 41% upside from the $15.61 close on Wednesday. It also matters that this call was from the widely followed Goldman Sachs Group (NYSE: GS).
CEO Marissa Mayer recent appointed Ken Goldman as CFO. Today’s coverage was based on a “sum of the parts analysis” to get to $22 now that the Alibaba stake sale is behind it. Goldman Sachs is also looking at the capital allocation ahead (that would be dividends and/or share buybacks). Another positive is that the value of the Yahoo! Japan stake has risen by about 30% since the end of May and that leads to a more attractive valuation ahead.
This call contrasts with two recent calls from BMO Capital Markets and Wells Fargo in recent days, both of which were only given “Market Perform” ratings.
We would note that the consensus analyst price target from Thomson Reuters is $18.20, and that still leaves some decent upside after the 1.4% gain to $15.82 seen so far this morning. Yahoo! has traded in a 52-week range of $13.11 to $16.79. What is surprising is that there have been only about 2 million shares traded so far this morning.
Yahoo! is tied very tightly to Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) for search now, and it will be interesting to see how Marissa Mayer handles that relationship going forward. Analysts also have started hiking their price targets and expanding their earnings multiple ahead on Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) now that Google has taken out new highs.
Yahoo! has such a checkered past that investors just refuse to believe what they see here. That old $30 buyout almost certainly will never come back any time soon, and the company has gone through more management and directional changes than can easily be counted.
That being said, today’s $22.00 price target is a very aggressive one, considering that the highest price target is $22.00 according to Thomson Reuters.
JON C. OGG
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