Trouble in the 'cloud' for Amazon? Deutsche Bank cuts price forecast in rare bearish analyst move
Trouble may be brewing for Amazon's (NASDAQ: AMZN) cloud computing business.
Deutsche Bank told investors the market may get surprised by weaker than expected Amazon Web Services (AWS) growth in the second quarter.
Analysts are almost universally bullish on Amazon with 86 percent of Wall Street firms rating the internet company at buy or overweight, according to FactSet. The internet firm's shares are up 35 percent this year through Monday compared to the S&P 500's (INDEX: .SPX) 10 percent return.
"We trim our AWS estimates and see near-term risk to investor sentiment around AMZN given slightly more cautious checks around cloud migration," analyst Lloyd Walmsley wrote in a note to clients Monday. "We have not heard much in the way of investor concern around AWS revenue deceleration this quarter (unlike last quarter)."
The analyst lowered his price target for Amazon to $1,135 from $1,150, representing 12 percent upside from Monday's close. He reiterated his buy rating on the shares.
Walmsley cited conversations with AWS partners at recent industry conferences which revealed cloud computing migrations are "a little bit slower than expected." As a result, he lowered his second quarter AWS revenue growth forecast to 39 percent from 40 percent versus the Wall Street consensus of 41 percent.
"Our 'end state' view remains bullish on AWS/cloud centric computing, and we remain steadfastly upbeat on the long term retail opportunity in NA [North America] and int'l," he wrote. "We would use any pullback around AWS growth rate shortfalls to add to long term positions."
Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The company is slated to report earnings results on July 27.
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