(Bloomberg) — Amazon.com Inc. shares fell in premarket trading on Monday, following a rare analyst downgrade that cited concerns over margin trends into next year, which growth in the cloud computing business is unlikely to compensate for.
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Wells Fargo Securities cut the stock to equal weight from overweight, with analyst Ken Gawrelski becoming one of the few analysts tracked by Bloomberg who doesn’t have a buy recommendation on the stock. He also cut his price target from $225 to $183, one of the lowest on Wall Street.
The e-commerce and cloud-computing giant fell 1.4% to $184 before the bell. The stock is up 23% this year, as of its last close, modestly outperforming the 19% gain of the Nasdaq 100 Index.
Amazon “has been a consistent positive revision story, but we believe factors pressure revisions in the near term,” Gawrelski wrote. “While the market is more prepared for pressure on 4Q [operating income], we caution that margin expansion could be capped in 1H25 as well.”
There is limited visibility into a resumption of positive estimate revisions until the company’s July 2025 outlook, he wrote, and the strength of the Amazon Web Services cloud computing business, or AWS, on its own is not enough.
Amazon is one of the best-liked stocks on Wall Street, with about 94% of analysts holding the equivalent of a buy rating on the stock, while none recommend selling. The average analyst price target of roughly $219 points represents and upside of about 18% over the coming 12 months.
The broad optimism comes is large part related to the AWS business, which is expected to see long-term demand tailwinds related to artificial intelligence, although there are near-term concerns related to how much the company is spending on AI-related investments
Also on Monday, Bloomberg Intelligence wrote that sales gains for AWS “appear likely to accelerate 20% in 2025, roughly 200 bps above consensus, our analysis shows, with greater contribution from gen AI, while demand for non-AI discretionary IT spending stabilizes.”
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