Bullish Tigress boosts Alphabet target with eye on AI and buybacks
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Tigress Financial sees some further upside in an already bullish stance on Alphabet (GOOG +0.5%, GOOGL +0.7%) - raising its target price and looking to artificial intelligence to drive progress at the tech giant.
The firm reiterated a Strong Buy rating on the stock. (They're in substantial company, as Wall Street overall has a Strong Buy on the stock.)
Alphabet's earnings last month gave a boost to its stock thanks to a sharp beat of expectations, along with a planned stock split.
Those earnings were driven by "broad-based strength in advertiser spend, strong consumer online activity, and substantial ongoing revenue growth from Google Cloud," Tigress notes.
The company's AI focus "continues to optimize its user experience, helps millions of businesses thrive and find new customers, and drives increasing Cloud functionality and customer adoption."
Alphabet is demonstrating continued strength in key growth areas including search, mobile, cloud, data center, e-commerce, entertainment, home automation, autonomous vehicle technology, and health and fitness, the firm notes. "GOOGL continues to benefit from current work, learn, play, and entertain at home trends, driven by its dominant position in every key secular technology trend that enables consumers to communicate and access information."
As for returning cash to shareholders, along with the amendment to its $50 billion share repurchase authorization, Tigress expects another "significant" buyback authorization to come when Q1 results arrive in April.
Its new 12-month target price for GOOGL of $3,670 implies another 36% upside.
Thursday, the European Union set a Sept. 14 decision date for Google's appeal of a record â¬4.3 billion fine.