Backblaze (NASDAQ:BLZE) Shares Up 8.6% – Should You Buy?

Backblaze, Inc. (NASDAQ:BLZE)’s stock price was up 8.6% during trading on Friday . The company traded as high as $14.71 and last traded at $13.7160. 568,489 shares were traded during trading, a decline of 71% from the average daily volume of 1,936,045 shares. The stock had previously closed at $12.63.

Wall Street Analysts Forecast Growth

BLZE has been the topic of several recent research reports. William Blair upgraded Backblaze from an “underperform” rating to a “market perform” rating in a research report on Tuesday, June 23rd. Craig Hallum upgraded Backblaze from a “hold” rating to a “buy” rating and lifted their price objective for the stock from $6.50 to $16.00 in a research report on Tuesday, June 23rd. Citizens Jmp boosted their target price on shares of Backblaze from $14.00 to $16.00 and gave the company a “market outperform” rating in a research note on Thursday, July 23rd. Wall Street Zen lowered shares of Backblaze from a “buy” rating to a “hold” rating in a report on Saturday, June 27th. Finally, Weiss Ratings cut shares of Backblaze from a “sell (d-)” rating to a “sell (e+)” rating in a research note on Friday, May 15th. Eight analysts have rated the stock with a Buy rating, one has assigned a Hold rating and one has given a Sell rating to the stock. Based on data from MarketBeat.com, Backblaze currently has a consensus rating of “Moderate Buy” and a consensus price target of $13.21.

Backblaze Stock Up 7.7%

The stock has a market cap of $817.24 million, a price-to-earnings ratio of -34.74 and a beta of 1.55. 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 stock has a fifty day moving average of $11.53 and a two-hundred day moving average of $6.99.

Backblaze (NASDAQ:BLZE) last issued its earnings results on Monday, May 4th. The company reported $0.04 EPS for the quarter, beating analysts’ consensus estimates of $0.02 by $0.02. Backblaze had a negative net margin of 14.97% and a negative return on equity of 20.54%. The business had revenue of $38.67 million for the quarter, compared to the consensus estimate of $37.78 million. As a group, analysts predict that Backblaze, Inc. will post -0.37 EPS for the current fiscal year.

Institutional Inflows and Outflows

A number of institutional investors and hedge funds have recently bought and sold shares of the business. Royal Bank of Canada increased its holdings in Backblaze by 1,388.2% during the 4th quarter. Royal Bank of Canada now owns 5,551 shares of the company’s stock worth $26,000 after purchasing an additional 5,178 shares during the last quarter. ProShare Advisors LLC acquired a new position in shares of Backblaze in the 4th quarter valued at approximately $47,000. Oxford Asset Management LLP purchased a new position in shares of Backblaze during the 4th quarter valued at approximately $47,000. M&T Bank Corp purchased a new position in shares of Backblaze during the 4th quarter valued at approximately $49,000. Finally, Occudo Quantitative Strategies LP acquired a new stake in shares of Backblaze during the second quarter worth approximately $58,000. Hedge funds and other institutional investors 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.