Backblaze (NASDAQ:BLZE) Price Target Raised to $23.00

Backblaze (NASDAQ:BLZE) had its target price raised by Needham & Company LLC from $14.00 to $23.00 in a report published on Tuesday morning, MarketBeat.com reports. Needham & Company LLC currently has a buy rating on the stock.

BLZE has been the topic of several other research reports. William Blair upgraded shares of Backblaze from an “underperform” rating to a “market perform” rating in a research note on Tuesday, June 23rd. Citigroup reissued a “market outperform” rating on shares of Backblaze in a research report on Thursday, July 23rd. Craig Hallum upgraded shares of Backblaze from a “hold” rating to a “buy” rating and boosted their price objective for the stock from $6.50 to $16.00 in a report on Tuesday, June 23rd. Citizens Jmp boosted their price objective on shares of Backblaze from $14.00 to $16.00 and gave the stock a “market outperform” rating in a report on Thursday, July 23rd. Finally, Wall Street Zen cut Backblaze from a “buy” rating to a “hold” rating in a research report on Saturday, June 27th. Eight research analysts have rated the stock with a Buy rating, one has assigned a Hold rating and one has issued a Sell rating to the stock. According to MarketBeat.com, the stock presently has an average rating of “Moderate Buy” and an average target price of $19.71.

Backblaze Price Performance

BLZE opened at $18.11 on Tuesday. The firm has a market cap of $1.09 billion, a PE ratio of -53.26 and a beta of 1.56. The stock has a 50-day moving average price of $12.46 and a 200-day moving average price of $7.42. Backblaze has a 1 year low of $3.26 and a 1 year high of $23.99. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.34, a current ratio of 1.00 and a quick ratio of 1.05.

Backblaze (NASDAQ:BLZE) last announced its quarterly earnings data on Monday, August 3rd. The company reported $0.08 EPS for the quarter, beating the consensus estimate of $0.02 by $0.06. The company had revenue of $42.71 million for the quarter, compared to the consensus estimate of $39.94 million. Backblaze had a negative net margin of 13.07% and a negative return on equity of 16.73%. Sell-side analysts predict that Backblaze will post -0.37 earnings per share for the current fiscal year.

Institutional Investors Weigh In On Backblaze

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

About Backblaze

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.