Backblaze (NASDAQ:BLZE) Stock Price Up 14.1% Following Analyst Upgrade

Backblaze, Inc. (NASDAQ:BLZE)’s share price traded up 14.1% on Thursday after B. Riley Financial raised their price target on the stock from $7.00 to $16.00. B. Riley Financial currently has a buy rating on the stock. Backblaze traded as high as $13.69 and last traded at $13.6530. Approximately 4,064,718 shares were traded during trading, an increase of 136% from the average daily volume of 1,725,462 shares. The stock had previously closed at $11.97.

Other equities research analysts have also issued research reports about the company. Craig Hallum upgraded Backblaze from a “hold” rating to a “buy” rating and upped their target price for the company from $6.50 to $16.00 in a research report on Tuesday. Wall Street Zen upgraded Backblaze from a “hold” rating to a “buy” rating in a report on Saturday, May 9th. Lake Street Capital boosted their price target on Backblaze from $11.00 to $14.00 and gave the company a “buy” rating in a research note on Wednesday. Needham & Company LLC raised their price objective on shares of Backblaze from $8.50 to $14.00 and gave the stock a “buy” rating in a research report on Wednesday. Finally, Weiss Ratings lowered shares of Backblaze from a “sell (d-)” rating to a “sell (e+)” rating in a research note on Friday, May 15th. Eight equities research analysts have rated the stock with a Buy rating, one has assigned a Hold rating and one has assigned a Sell rating to the stock. According to data from MarketBeat.com, the company currently has a consensus rating of “Moderate Buy” and a consensus price target of $12.93.

Institutional Investors Weigh In On Backblaze

A number of institutional investors and hedge funds have recently made changes to their positions in the business. Wasatch Advisors LP bought a new position in Backblaze in the 3rd quarter valued at about $17,021,000. Pillsbury Lake Capital LLC purchased a new stake in shares of Backblaze in the fourth quarter worth approximately $8,058,000. Renaissance Technologies LLC raised its stake in shares of Backblaze by 94.5% in the fourth quarter. Renaissance Technologies LLC now owns 810,752 shares of the company’s stock worth $3,778,000 after purchasing an additional 393,936 shares during the last quarter. Dimensional Fund Advisors LP lifted its holdings in shares of Backblaze by 152.3% in the first quarter. Dimensional Fund Advisors LP now owns 517,586 shares of the company’s stock valued at $1,785,000 after purchasing an additional 312,459 shares in the last quarter. Finally, Arrowstreet Capital Limited Partnership lifted its holdings in shares of Backblaze by 165.9% in the third quarter. Arrowstreet Capital Limited Partnership now owns 480,281 shares of the company’s stock valued at $4,457,000 after purchasing an additional 299,672 shares in the last quarter. Institutional investors and hedge funds own 54.03% of the company’s stock.

Backblaze Stock Performance

The company has a market cap of $819.52 million, a PE ratio of -34.96 and a beta of 1.72. 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 company has a 50-day moving average of $6.96 and a 200-day moving average of $5.23.

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

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.