In what has been an up and down quarter for technology, especially for some of the chip companies as demand for smartphones in China seems to have slowed, other areas have been absolutely on fire. Cloud computing and the impact of social media have continued growing almost unabated and show absolutely no signs of slowing down this year, next year or in the foreseeable future.
A recent Jefferies research report presents the firm’s top growth ideas for investors, and two of those ideas absolutely crushed first-quarter earnings estimates and raised the guidance going forward. While not suitable for more conservative accounts, the growth stock selections at Jefferies have solid continued upside potential.
Amazon
This company has finally put all the pieces together and has become an earnings juggernaut. Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) engages in the retail sale of consumer products in North America and internationally. It operates through the North America, International and Amazon Web Services (AWS) segments.
The company sells merchandise and content purchased for resale from vendors, as well as those offered by third-party sellers through retail websites. It also manufactures and sells electronic devices, including kindle e-readers, fire tablets, fire TVs and echo, as well as fire phones. It provides Kindle Direct Publishing, an online platform that allows independent authors and publishers to make their books available in the Kindle Store.
Amazon also serves developers and enterprises through the aforementioned Amazon Web Services, which provides compute, storage, database, analytics, applications and deployment services that enable virtually various businesses. AWS is the undisputed leader in the cloud now, and Jefferies sees the company expanding and moving up the enterprise information value chain and addressing a larger total addressable market. The company has had numerous recent product announcements, including Aurora for relational database engine, Quicksight for business intelligence and AWS Database Migration Support Service.
The company’s revenue exploded in the first quarter, and top analysts noted that after years of very uneven profitability, they feel the company is really focusing on the bottom line. Amazon absolutely annihilated analysts’ expectations on both its top and bottom lines for the first quarter, thanks mostly to its growing retail business and new cloud services.
The Jefferies price target for the stock is $865. The Thomson/First Call consensus target is $793.73. Shares closed Wednesday at $670.90.
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