Baird Adds Alphabet To Its Focus List - Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN)

Baird's Colin Sebastian added

AlphabetGOOG

to Baird's focus list, maintaining the company's Outperform rating and $860.00 price target. Sebastian believed Alphabet's expectations were "more achievable relative to mega-cap peers" such as

FacebookFB

and

AmazonAMZN

. Further notable catalysts were:

Continued revenue outperformance "as comps toughen in 2H16"
"Better optics around Cloud growth trajectory/momentum"
Increasing Mobile monetization opportunities from recent tweaks to ad formats
"CEO Ruth Porat may be exiting her honeymoon period [which] could provide a better set-up for the balance of the year."

Finally, Sebastian highlighted Alphabet's under-appreciated cloud asset. "Google operates the largest cloud infrastructure by a large margin, and engages in more technology infrastructure R&D… than any other company" said the Baird analyst. Enterprise customers already include 60 percent of Fortune 500 companies among "2 million [of its[ paying enterprise users."

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