Short Interest in VNET Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:VNET) Rises By 53.1%

VNET Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:VNET) saw a large increase in short interest in the month of March. As of March 15th, there was short interest totalling 32,500,000 shares, an increase of 53.1% from the February 28th total of 21,230,000 shares. Currently, 14.4% of the shares of the company are short sold. Based on an average trading volume of 9,200,000 shares, the short-interest ratio is presently 3.5 days.

VNET Group Stock Performance

Shares of NASDAQ VNET opened at $8.25 on Friday. The company has a market cap of $2.12 billion, a P/E ratio of -3.72, a P/E/G ratio of 1.01 and a beta of 0.07. VNET Group has a 52-week low of $1.42 and a 52-week high of $16.13. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 1.46, a quick ratio of 0.83 and a current ratio of 0.83. The firm’s fifty day moving average is $10.00 and its two-hundred day moving average is $6.06.

VNET Group (NASDAQ:VNET) last issued its earnings results on Wednesday, March 12th. The information technology services provider reported ($0.01) earnings per share (EPS) for the quarter, missing the consensus estimate of $0.03 by ($0.04). VNET Group had a negative return on equity of 5.68% and a negative net margin of 28.54%. The firm had revenue of $307.75 million during the quarter, compared to the consensus estimate of $284.88 million. As a group, analysts anticipate that VNET Group will post -0.06 EPS for the current fiscal year.

Analyst Ratings Changes

A number of research firms have weighed in on VNET. Citigroup upped their price target on shares of VNET Group from $16.10 to $20.00 and gave the stock a “buy” rating in a research report on Friday, March 14th. Nomura Securities raised VNET Group to a “strong-buy” rating in a report on Friday, February 21st. Finally, StockNews.com downgraded VNET Group from a “hold” rating to a “sell” rating in a research report on Friday, March 14th. One research analyst has rated the stock with a sell rating, four have assigned a buy rating and two have assigned a strong buy rating to the company. According to data from MarketBeat.com, VNET Group has a consensus rating of “Buy” and a consensus target price of $9.30.

Institutional Inflows and Outflows

A number of hedge funds and other institutional investors have recently modified their holdings of VNET. Barclays PLC increased its position in VNET Group by 229.3% in the fourth quarter. Barclays PLC now owns 7,093 shares of the information technology services provider’s stock worth $34,000 after purchasing an additional 4,939 shares during the last quarter. Point72 Asia Singapore Pte. Ltd. bought a new stake in shares of VNET Group in the 4th quarter worth about $41,000. Wolverine Trading LLC purchased a new stake in shares of VNET Group during the 3rd quarter valued at about $46,000. Catalina Capital Group LLC bought a new position in shares of VNET Group in the 4th quarter valued at about $54,000. Finally, Hsbc Holdings PLC purchased a new position in VNET Group in the fourth quarter worth about $66,000. 72.83% of the stock is currently owned by institutional investors.

About VNET Group

VNET Group, Inc, an investment holding company, provides hosting and related services in China. It offers managed hosting services consisting of managed retail services, such as colocation services that dedicate data center space to house customers' servers and networking equipment, as well as allow customers to lease partial or entire cabinets for their servers; interconnectivity services that allow customers to connect their servers; value-added services, including hybrid IT, bare metal, firewall, server load balancing, data backup and recovery, data center management, server management, and backup server services; cloud services that allow customers to run applications over the internet using IT infrastructure; and VPN Services that extend customers' private networks by setting up connections through the public internet.