Marc Suidan Sells 2,110 Shares of Backblaze (NASDAQ:BLZE) Stock

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

Backblaze Price Performance

BLZE stock traded down $0.25 during mid-day trading on Monday, hitting $15.55. The stock had a trading volume of 3,460,072 shares, compared to its average volume of 2,179,476. The firm has a fifty day simple moving average of $14.76 and a 200 day simple moving average of $8.48. The firm has a market capitalization of $962.54 million, a P/E ratio of -45.73 and a beta of 1.56. The company has a current ratio of 1.00, a quick ratio of 1.00 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.34. 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 earnings per share 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 the consensus estimate of $39.94 million. Backblaze had a negative net margin of 13.07% and a negative return on equity of 16.73%. As a group, research analysts forecast that Backblaze, Inc. will post -0.26 EPS for the current year.

Institutional Investors Weigh In On Backblaze

A number of institutional investors and hedge funds have recently made changes to their positions in the business. Royal Bank of Canada lifted its holdings in shares of 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 bought a new stake in Backblaze in the 4th quarter worth about $47,000. Oxford Asset Management LLP bought a new stake in Backblaze in the 4th quarter worth about $47,000. M&T Bank Corp purchased a new stake in Backblaze in the 4th quarter valued at about $49,000. Finally, Occudo Quantitative Strategies LP bought a new position in shares of Backblaze during the 2nd quarter worth approximately $58,000. Institutional investors and hedge funds own 54.03% of the company’s stock.

Analysts Set New Price Targets

A number of research analysts have recently commented on BLZE shares. Wall Street Zen upgraded Backblaze from a “hold” rating to a “buy” rating in a research note on Saturday, August 8th. Lake Street Capital restated a “buy” rating and issued a $21.00 target price on shares of Backblaze in a report on Tuesday, August 4th. Weiss Ratings reaffirmed a “sell (e+)” rating on shares of Backblaze in a research report on Wednesday, August 12th. Craig Hallum upgraded Backblaze from a “hold” rating to a “buy” rating and increased their price target for the stock from $6.50 to $16.00 in a report on Tuesday, June 23rd. Finally, Citizens Jmp lifted their price objective on Backblaze from $16.00 to $21.00 and gave the stock a “market outperform” rating in a research report on Tuesday, August 4th. Eight investment analysts have rated the stock with a Buy rating, one has issued a Hold rating and one has issued a Sell rating to the company. According to MarketBeat, the company currently has an average rating of “Moderate Buy” and an average target price of $19.71.

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.