Amazon stock popped during regular trading hours on Thursday after one analyst said his Amazon valuation estimates suggest the company will be worth $1.6 trillion within the next seven to eight years. His note about the cloud and e-commerce giant boosted its stock by more than 1%, raising its market capitalization to nearly $472 billion.
The report does raise the question of how Amazon’s valuation will compare to Apple’s, given that so much of Wall Street expects Apple to become the first trillion-dollar company, not Amazon.
Calculating Amazon valuation now and then
MKM Partners analyst Rob Sanderson quickly became the talk of Wall Street with his Amazon valuation estimate. He expects the company to be worth another 3.5 times what it’s worth right now and again argued that its earnings don’t really matter for it right now.
He reiterated his Buy rating and $1,275 price target, one of the highest on the Street, if not the highest, and said he strongly supports the company’s reinvestment strategy. In fact, he thinks Amazon should “deploy all available capital until reinvestment opportunities become more limited or more risky [sic].” He then examined each of the company’s parts and explained how they factor into his Amazon valuation estimate.
Amazon valuation in parts
For example, Sanderson noted that Amazon’s share of retail spending climbed by nine times between 2008 and 2016. In fact, the online retailer’s share gains accelerated in the first half of the year to reach 5.1%. He expects Amazon’s retail business alone to be biggest than Walmart, potentially reaching a 15.5% share of the U.S. retail market by 2025, versus Walmart’s 12.2% share last year.
The MKM analyst also expects Amazon’s retail operating margin to surpass those of traditional U.S. retail businesses, which he pegs at about 6.5%. He notes that the company’s first-party business insources most of its marketing and distribution, so he believes it can do better than 6.5%.
He also expects Fulfillment by Amazon to be at least as profitable as other logistics companies are. Further, he predicts that the online retailer’s third-party commissions and ad revenues will reach a margin profile similar those of other major large-scale ad platforms.
The analyst described Amazon Web Services as “the juggernaut in the tech sector,” adding that he expects it to be the most valuable tech company. He predicts a 20% compound annual growth rate for AWS for at least eight more years, noting that the cloud business is growing a lot faster than Microsoft grew on its way to dominance in the PC industry.
Amazon valuation at $1 trillion in five years: Jefferies
Lately it’s been almost all Amazon all the time, with several Wall Street firms turning out lengthy reports and Amazon valuation estimates. Jefferies analysts released their “Internet Playbook” two weeks ago, and although they covered Amazon very extensively, they expect Facebook to outperform it over the next 12 months. However, they also said they could be wrong because “Amazon is one of the most well-run companies in the world, and extending its dominance into new markets, could lead to more upside.”
They see Amazon Web Services at $55 billion in revenue by 2022 and peg Amazon valuation as nearing $1 trillion by then. The Jefferies team described AWS as “the de facto standard in the public cloud,” as it’s about four times the size of Microsoft Azure and double the size of its next five closest competitors combined.
Amazon stock rose as high as $980.59 during regular trading hours on Thursday, remaining well below its 52-week high of $1,083.51.
