Five-star Drexel Hamilton analyst Brian White has just issued an incredibly bullish analysis of disappearing photo app Snap Inc (NASDAQ:SNAP). White is ranked an impressive #181 out of 4,642 analysts tracked by TipRanks.
White reiterated his buy rating on September 5 with a $30 price target. This translates into huge upside potential of 110% from the current share price of just $14.27. Shares in SNAP have tanked following its IPO in March. Prices reached $27 before investors became anxious about the stock’s long-term money-making potential. And the release of Facebook’s rival Instagram Stories did nothing to improve the mood.
But as White points out, “Snap continues to grow at a rapid pace, introduce new innovations, roll-out compelling content and remain true to its core base of millennial followers.” He concludes: “we continue to believe Snap has strong upside potential over the next 12 months as reflected in our $30.00 price target.”
In his report, the analyst makes four key points to support his target:
1) Snap’s stock is starting to show more resilience and the peak to trough performance is “frighteningly similar” to that of Facebook in 2012. This includes a 60% stock decrease in the post-IPO months.
2) Even in the face of FB competition, Snapchat continues to perform well with young millennials as highlighted in a recent comScore report. White says Snapchat’s addressable reach is more important to advertisers than DAU.
3) Snap has focused on simplifying the process for advertisers to buy on its ads platform but at a faster pace than expected. This has pressured pricing in the near term, but means Snap can now attract more advertisers and offer a better ROI (return on investment).
4) Apple’s iPhone 8 should provide more enthusiasm around the augmented reality (AR) trend. This should filter through to Snap, which stands out as an early pioneer of this trend.
Since the stock’s launch, White has maintained his bullish SNAP rating. However, TipRanks shows the repercussions of this approach: on Snap specifically he has a very poor 20% success rate and -14.4% average return.
These statistics are mirrored across all analysts who have been bullish on Snapchat from the beginning. Will their confidence begin to pay off soon? Only time will tell, but even so $30 sounds optimistic.
Overall the stock has a Hold analyst consensus rating. If we break this down we can see that in the last three months, analysts have published 9 buy, 13 hold and 6 sell ratings on Snap. Meanwhile the average analyst price target of $15.10 stands at a much more marginal 5.82% upside from the current share price.
