Backblaze, Inc. (NASDAQ:BLZE) Receives Consensus Rating of “Moderate Buy” from Brokerages

Shares of Backblaze, Inc. (NASDAQ:BLZE) have received an average recommendation of “Moderate Buy” from the ten ratings firms that are presently covering the stock, MarketBeat.com reports. One equities research analyst has rated the stock with a sell rating, one has given a hold rating and eight have assigned a buy rating to the company. The average 12 month target price among brokerages that have issued ratings on the stock in the last year is $12.9286.

BLZE has been the subject of several recent research reports. Weiss Ratings cut Backblaze from a “sell (d-)” rating to a “sell (e+)” rating in a research note on Friday, May 15th. Lake Street Capital lifted their price objective on Backblaze from $11.00 to $14.00 and gave the stock a “buy” rating in a research note on Wednesday, June 24th. Citigroup reiterated an “outperform” rating on shares of Backblaze in a report on Wednesday, June 24th. Craig Hallum raised shares of Backblaze from a “hold” rating to a “buy” rating and increased their target price for the company from $6.50 to $16.00 in a research report on Tuesday, June 23rd. Finally, Citizens Jmp raised their price target on shares of Backblaze from $8.00 to $14.00 and gave the stock a “market outperform” rating in a report on Wednesday, June 24th.

Hedge Funds Weigh In On Backblaze

A number of hedge funds have recently bought and sold shares of BLZE. Royal Bank of Canada lifted its holdings 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 buying an additional 5,178 shares during the period. ProShare Advisors LLC acquired a new stake in Backblaze during the 4th quarter worth about $47,000. Oxford Asset Management LLP bought a new position in shares of Backblaze in the 4th quarter worth about $47,000. M&T Bank Corp bought a new position in shares of Backblaze in the 4th quarter worth about $49,000. Finally, Occudo Quantitative Strategies LP acquired a new position in shares of Backblaze in the 2nd quarter valued at about $58,000. Institutional investors own 54.03% of the company’s stock.

Backblaze Trading Down 1.3%

Shares of BLZE stock traded down $0.23 during trading hours on Friday, hitting $17.60. 2,260,282 shares of the company’s stock traded hands, compared to its average volume of 5,159,398. The stock’s 50 day simple moving average is $9.78 and its 200 day simple moving average is $6.14. The stock has a market cap of $1.06 billion, a PE ratio of -45.13 and a beta of 1.55. Backblaze has a 12 month low of $3.26 and a 12 month high of $18.25. The company has a quick ratio of 1.05, a current ratio of 1.05 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.28.

Backblaze (NASDAQ:BLZE) last issued its quarterly earnings data on Monday, May 4th. The company reported $0.04 earnings per share for the quarter, topping the consensus estimate of $0.02 by $0.02. The company had revenue of $38.67 million for the quarter, compared to analysts’ expectations of $37.78 million. Backblaze had a negative net margin of 14.97% and a negative return on equity of 20.54%. On average, sell-side analysts anticipate that Backblaze will post -0.37 EPS for the current year.

About Backblaze

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.