Insider Selling: Backblaze (NASDAQ:BLZE) CFO Sells $33,380.20 in Stock

Backblaze, Inc. (NASDAQ:BLZE) CFO Marc Suidan sold 2,110 shares of Backblaze stock in a transaction on Friday, August 21st. The stock was sold at an average price of $15.82, for a total transaction of $33,380.20. Following the completion of the transaction, the chief financial officer directly owned 349,518 shares in the company, valued at $5,529,374.76. This represents a 0.60% decrease in their ownership of the stock. The transaction was disclosed in a legal filing with the SEC, which is accessible through the SEC website. The sale was made to cover tax withholding obligations related to the vesting of equity awards.

Backblaze Stock Performance

Shares of Backblaze stock opened at $14.98 on Thursday. The firm has a market capitalization of $927.26 million, a P/E ratio of -44.06 and a beta of 1.56. The company has a quick ratio of 1.00, a current ratio of 1.00 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.34. The company has a 50 day moving average price of $15.18 and a 200 day moving average price of $8.72. Backblaze, Inc. has a 52 week low of $3.26 and a 52 week high of $23.99.

Backblaze (NASDAQ:BLZE) last issued its quarterly earnings results on Monday, August 3rd. The company reported $0.08 EPS for the quarter, topping analysts’ consensus estimates of $0.02 by $0.06. The company had revenue of $42.71 million during the quarter, compared to analysts’ expectations of $39.94 million. Backblaze had a negative return on equity of 16.73% and a negative net margin of 13.07%. Sell-side analysts expect that Backblaze, Inc. will post -0.26 EPS for the current year.

Institutional Inflows and Outflows

Several hedge funds and other institutional investors have recently bought and sold shares of the business. California State Teachers Retirement System lifted its position in Backblaze by 319.2% during the 2nd quarter. California State Teachers Retirement System now owns 12,514 shares of the company’s stock worth $198,000 after acquiring an additional 9,529 shares during the period. AXQ Capital LP acquired a new position in shares of Backblaze in the second quarter valued at approximately $314,000. AWM Investment Company Inc. purchased a new stake in shares of Backblaze during the second quarter worth approximately $22,207,000. Globeflex Capital L P purchased a new stake in shares of Backblaze during the second quarter worth approximately $323,000. Finally, Bank of New York Mellon Corp acquired a new stake in shares of Backblaze during the second quarter worth $3,074,000. 54.03% of the stock is owned by hedge funds and other institutional investors.

Analyst Ratings Changes

Several research analysts recently commented on the company. B. Riley Financial increased their price objective on Backblaze from $16.00 to $24.00 and gave the company a “buy” rating in a research note on Tuesday, August 4th. Craig Hallum raised shares of Backblaze from a “hold” rating to a “buy” rating and raised their price target for the stock from $6.50 to $16.00 in a research note on Tuesday, June 23rd. William Blair raised shares of Backblaze from an “underperform” rating to a “market perform” rating in a research note on Tuesday, June 23rd. Weiss Ratings reissued a “sell (e+)” rating on shares of Backblaze in a research note on Wednesday, August 12th. Finally, Lake Street Capital restated a “buy” rating and issued a $21.00 price target on shares of Backblaze in a research report on Tuesday, August 4th. Eight equities research analysts have rated the stock with a Buy rating, one has assigned a Hold rating and one has given a Sell rating to the company’s stock. Based on data from MarketBeat.com, Backblaze presently has an average rating of “Moderate Buy” and a consensus price target of $19.71.

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.