24/7 Wall St.

The rise of Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) has been an incredible journey. Jeff Bezos and his team have disrupted more retail and consumer segments than anyone could have imagined, and the effort often ends up dominating a segment when they put their minds and efforts there. Amazon has acted as though it couldn’t care less if it loses money or breaks even while it boosts its footprint. Whether this is a call that is the last all-time high upgrade remains to be seen, but a week ago Amazon was being touted as a $3 trillion opportunity at the Sohn Conference.

On Tuesday came a new street high analyst price target for Amazon — all the way up at $1,000. Bernstein’s Carlos Kirjner was the analyst behind the call, and the prior target was a mere $770. Amazon’s prior street high analyst target was $915, and the consensus analyst price target was $793.56.

The AWS unit is of course a part here, but so is the retail segment. Kirjner now feels that Amazon’s first-part sales will grow faster than its lower margin sales. That is expected to drive the company’s margin higher as a result. Those margins should also grow much faster than other analysts have modeled into their projections. His view is that margins will expand much faster in the coming two years than they did in the prior two years.

One issue behind the exceeding projections is that the company’s units are now large enough that it is getting harder for Amazon to find new areas to spend endless amounts of money to get into. As these segments get more mature, their profits are expected to rise.

Amazon is also shown to be showing very little deceleration in the retail business, with much of that tied to the loyalty of the Amazon Prime effort.

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