Analyst revises Google parent Alphabet's stock price target before earnings

Here's what could happen next to Alphabet's shares.

Apr 23, 2024 - 06:30

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Analyst revises Google parent Alphabet's stock price target before earnings

This probably wasn't what The Doors meant when they sang, "c'mon on, baby, light my fire."

The legendary rock band's 1967 signature song was about turning people on instead of actually lighting things on fire.

Back in February, Waymo, the robotaxi company backed by Alphabet (GOOG) , saw one of its vehicles set alight by a hostile group of individuals in San Francisco's Chinatown, with one person reportedly shouting "Light that shit on fire!"

Police filed charges against a 14-year-old boy last week, but then on Saturday, someone vandalized a Waymo vehicle, according to KRON4.

The video shows the person stomping the front windshield in an attempt to break it open.

The incident prompted Tesla (TSLA) CEO Elon Musk to post an exclamation mark on his X social media platform and write, "Does make you feel sorry for the bots."

Nevertheless, Waymo announced plans to expand its network following a March 1 ruling by the California Public Utilities Commission.

Waymo was one of the factors cited by Wall Street analysts on April 22 ahead of Google's parent company's quarterly results.

Alphabet is scheduled to report first-quarter results on April 25. Analysts surveyed by FactSet expect the company to report earnings of $1.51 per share, on $78.7 billion in revenue.

A year earlier, Alphabet earned $1.17 per share on revenue of $69.8 billion.

Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, and Alphabet
Boris Streubel/Getty Images

Company 'making tough decisions'

Last year, Google Chief Financial Officer Ruth Porat announced that she would be stepping down from Alphabet's top finance chief role to eventually assume a dual role of chief investment officer and president.

She became Google's CFO in 2015 and oversaw the transition into the company’s current Alphabet structure.

More recently, Porat told the company’s finance teams that their groups would see restructuring, including relocations and layoffs, CNBC reported last week.

“The tech sector is in the midst of a tremendous platform shift with Al,” Porat wrote in the memo, obtained by CNBC, sent to finance employees.

“As a company, this means we have the opportunity to make more helpful products for billions of users and provide faster solutions to our customers, but it also means we collectively have to make tough decisions, including how and where we work to align with our highest priority areas,” she said.

The restructuring will affect finance teams domestically and abroad, including in Asia-Pacific, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.

KeyBanc analysts noted Porat's career move when they raised their price target on Alphabet to $175 from $165 while keeping an overweight rating on shares.

Alphabet has near-term catalysts forming from multiple events: operating expense discipline, the Waymo expansion, a potential dividend, and a new CFO, the firm said.

In contrast, the analysts noted that Facebook parent Meta Platforms (META) "having a wide revenue guidance range around unrest in the Middle East could alarm investors, particularly if the first quarter’s outperformance moderates."

Meta is scheduled to report first-quarter earnings on April 24 and KeyBanc cut its price target on the social media titan to $555 from $575 while maintaining a buy rating.

Analyst sees more Google layoffs

The firm said that Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai's April 18 blog post entitled "Building for our AI future", signaled that the company is more focused on product velocity, and is taking actions to restructure divisions.

"We believe this is congruent with our view of layoffs persisting through 2Q and speaks to further operating income upside," Keybanc said.

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The analysts said Meta Platforms, an AI rival to Alphabet, continues to show progress with AI, from the expansion of Meta Assistant to the release of Llama 3, the latest iteration in Meta’s series of large language models.

During the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call in January, Pichai told analysts that Alphabet has “led the way in using AI to improve many of our products from search to ads to most of our consumer and enterprise products, helping billions of people already.”

"We closed the year by launching the Gemini era, a new industry-leading series of models that will fuel the next generation of advances," he said. "Gemini is the first realization of the vision we had when we formed Google DeepMind, bringing together our two world-class research teams."

KeyBanc analysts believe Alphabet's capital expenditures could reach $42 billion this year and $46 billion in 2025 as it continues to invest in AI technical infrastructure.

Regarding dividends, the analysts noted that Meta surprised investors by implementing a dividend policy during its fourth-quarter earnings call.

"Our sense is investors would like to see Alphabet follow Meta's lead as it represents a good use of cash and does not carry the headaches of M&A," KeyBanck said. "While we believe the likelihood of a dividend has gone up, we believe it's hard to predict whether Alphabet will pursue this before or after a new CEO is chosen."

On April 17, Truist Securities analysts boosted their price target for Alphabet to $170 from $158 per share, while holding on to their buy rating.

Truist said the adjustment reflected a positive outlook based on sustained user engagement and advertising revenue growth, particularly in Search and Social platforms.

The firm anticipates that Alphabet's first-quarter results will surpass consensus estimates, citing cost management as a key factor in driving year-over-year margin improvement.

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