Backblaze (NASDAQ:BLZE) Raised to Market Perform at William Blair

Backblaze (NASDAQ:BLZE) was upgraded by William Blair from an “underperform” rating to a “market perform” rating in a research report issued to clients and investors on Tuesday.

Other equities research analysts also recently issued reports about the stock. Loop Capital set a $8.00 price target on shares of Backblaze in a research note on Tuesday, February 24th. Oppenheimer reduced their price objective on shares of Backblaze from $9.50 to $8.50 and set an “outperform” rating on the stock in a research note on Tuesday, February 24th. B. Riley Financial raised shares of Backblaze to a “strong-buy” rating in a report on Thursday, April 2nd. Citizens Jmp reissued a “market outperform” rating and issued a $8.00 price target on shares of Backblaze in a research note on Tuesday, May 5th. Finally, Weiss Ratings lowered Backblaze from a “sell (d-)” rating to a “sell (e+)” rating in a research report on Friday, May 15th. One investment analyst has rated the stock with a Strong Buy rating, seven have issued a Buy rating, one has given a Hold rating and one has given a Sell rating to the company. Based on data from MarketBeat.com, the stock has a consensus rating of “Moderate Buy” and a consensus target price of $9.64.

Backblaze Trading Up 43.5%

BLZE stock traded up $3.53 during midday trading on Tuesday, reaching $11.65. The stock had a trading volume of 30,211,155 shares, compared to its average volume of 1,572,151. The business has a fifty day simple moving average of $6.63 and a two-hundred day simple moving average of $5.13. The company has a quick ratio of 1.05, a current ratio of 1.05 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.28. The firm has a market cap of $700.16 million, a price-to-earnings ratio of -29.87 and a beta of 1.71. Backblaze has a twelve month low of $3.26 and a twelve month high of $11.82.

Backblaze (NASDAQ:BLZE) last released its earnings results on Monday, May 4th. The company reported $0.04 earnings per share (EPS) for the quarter, beating analysts’ consensus estimates of $0.02 by $0.02. The company had revenue of $38.67 million for the quarter, compared to the consensus estimate of $37.78 million. Backblaze had a negative net margin of 14.97% and a negative return on equity of 20.54%. As a group, research analysts expect that Backblaze will post -0.33 EPS for the current fiscal year.

Institutional Inflows and Outflows

A number of institutional investors have recently bought and sold shares of BLZE. Royal Bank of Canada increased its stake in Backblaze by 1,388.2% in the fourth quarter. Royal Bank of Canada now owns 5,551 shares of the company’s stock valued at $26,000 after purchasing an additional 5,178 shares in the last quarter. ProShare Advisors LLC acquired a new stake in Backblaze in the fourth quarter worth $47,000. Oxford Asset Management LLP bought a new position in shares of Backblaze during the fourth quarter worth $47,000. M&T Bank Corp bought a new position in shares of Backblaze during the fourth quarter worth $49,000. Finally, Occudo Quantitative Strategies LP acquired a new position in shares of Backblaze in the 2nd quarter valued at $58,000. Institutional investors and hedge funds own 54.03% of the company’s stock.

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.