Backblaze (NASDAQ:BLZE) Upgraded by Wall Street Zen to “Buy” Rating

Wall Street Zen upgraded shares of Backblaze (NASDAQ:BLZE) from a hold rating to a buy rating in a report released on Saturday morning.

BLZE has been the subject of a number of other research reports. Craig Hallum raised shares of Backblaze from a “hold” rating to a “buy” rating and boosted their price objective for the company from $6.50 to $16.00 in a research report 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 cut shares of Backblaze from a “sell (d-)” rating to a “sell (e+)” rating in a research note on Friday, May 15th. Citigroup reiterated a “market outperform” rating on shares of Backblaze in a report on Thursday, July 23rd. Finally, Needham & Company LLC increased their price target on Backblaze from $14.00 to $23.00 and gave the stock a “buy” rating in a research note on Tuesday, August 4th. Eight investment analysts have rated the stock with a Buy rating, one has issued a Hold rating and one has given a Sell rating to the company’s stock. According to MarketBeat.com, Backblaze presently has a consensus rating of “Moderate Buy” and a consensus target price of $19.71.

Backblaze Trading Up 3.9%

Backblaze stock opened at $18.82 on Friday. The stock has a market cap of $1.16 billion, a PE ratio of -55.35 and a beta of 1.56. The stock has a 50-day moving average price of $12.68 and a 200 day moving average price of $7.50. Backblaze has a 52 week low of $3.26 and a 52 week high of $23.99. The company has a current ratio of 1.00, a quick ratio of 1.05 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.34.

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

Hedge Funds Weigh In On Backblaze

Several hedge funds and other institutional investors have recently modified their holdings of the company. Baader Bank Aktiengesellschaft purchased a new position in Backblaze in the 4th quarter worth approximately $699,000. Arrowstreet Capital Limited Partnership raised its stake in shares of Backblaze by 56.0% during the first quarter. Arrowstreet Capital Limited Partnership now owns 300,504 shares of the company’s stock valued at $1,037,000 after purchasing an additional 107,876 shares during the period. GSA Capital Partners LLP raised its stake in shares of Backblaze by 159.7% during the fourth quarter. GSA Capital Partners LLP now owns 299,218 shares of the company’s stock valued at $1,394,000 after purchasing an additional 184,015 shares during the period. Nano Cap New Millennium Growth Fund L P acquired a new position in shares of Backblaze during the fourth quarter worth $1,165,000. Finally, Renaissance Technologies LLC boosted its stake in shares of Backblaze by 44.6% in the first quarter. Renaissance Technologies LLC now owns 1,172,657 shares of the company’s stock valued at $4,046,000 after purchasing an additional 361,905 shares during the period. 54.03% of the stock is owned by institutional investors and hedge funds.

Backblaze Company Profile

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.