Latest news with #Performance+
Yahoo
5 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
JP Morgan upgrades Pinterest on engagement gains, attractive valuation
-- JP Morgan upgraded Pinterest Inc (NYSE:PINS) to Overweight from Neutral and raised its price target to $40 from $35, citing improved user engagement, monetization gains, and an undemanding valuation. Pinterest has a growing user base, improving ad revenue, and expanding profit margins. Despite a 10% year-to-date gain, PINS shares are still down 18% from February highs, presenting what JP Morgan sees as a favorable entry point. JP Morgan noted that 85% of users access Pinterest via its mobile app, which also drives over 90% of the company's revenue, reducing exposure to broader search platform volatility. Analysts believe Pinterest's full-funnel ad platform and AI tools like Performance+ are helping capture a larger share of ad budgets, especially from mid-sized advertisers. The firm expects 14% revenue growth in both Q2 and full-year 2025, and sees room for further upside. Pinterest is also nearing the low end of its targeted 30-34% adjusted EBITDA margin range, and JPMorgan believes faster top-line growth and cost control could drive multi-year margin expansion. At 13x 2026 free cash flow and 12x 2026 adjusted EBITDA, the stock trades below historical averages, while stock-based compensation as a percentage of EBITDA is expected to decline. The new $40 price target reflects a 15.5x multiple on 2026 estimated EBITDA of $1.54 billion. JP Morgan sees solid execution and underappreciated fundamentals as reasons for a more bullish stance, calling Pinterest's risk/reward 'favorable.' Related articles JP Morgan upgrades Pinterest on engagement gains, attractive valuation Goldman Sachs starts coverage on auto services stock with mixed ratings Truist upgrades Oshkosh saying stock 'too cheap to ignore'
Globe and Mail
19-04-2025
- Business
- Globe and Mail
4 Top Tech Stocks to Buy Right Now
Amidst the market volatility due to tariffs and trade tensions, many top tech companies are now selling at much more attractive valuations than just a few months ago. Let's look at four leading tech stocks you can buy right now for the long haul. All four were recently trading at forward price-to-earnings ratios (P/Es) of under 22, and yet each still has a bright future ahead that merits a higher valuation. Pinterest (P/E of 13.8) Pinterest (NYSE: PINS) operates an online vision board that has more than 550 million monthly active users (MAU) across the globe. The company has always trailed other social media sites when it comes to monetizing its user base. But since taking over a little less than three years ago, CEO William Ready has emphasized technological investments and making the platform more shoppable. Better monetizing its user base is a huge opportunity for Pinterest, especially in the markets outside the U.S. and Europe where more than half its user base resides. The company has teamed up with Google to help better target and monetize these users. Thus far, it has seen early success, with its "rest of world" revenue up 44% last quarter. Meanwhile, the company is also looking for its Performance+ platform, launched last fall, to be a growth driver. The platform integrates its automation and artificial intelligence (AI) features to simplify campaign setups, improve the creative process, better target users, and optimize bidding. The platform is meant to improve ad effectiveness and conversions, which should lead to high ad impressions and rates while attracting new advertisers. Pinterest's stock is cheap, and it has a nice long-term opportunity ahead. Alphabet (P/E of 16.3) Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOGL)(NASDAQ: GOOG) is best known for its Google search business, and search plays a major role in its expansive advertising empire. Google also owns YouTube, the fourth-largest digital advertising platform globally. It serves ads to third-party apps and websites through its Ad Manager platform and helps companies like Pinterest better monetize their user base in emerging markets. In a world changing with AI, Google's extensive ad network and adtech tools should not be underestimated. In addition, the company has other exciting non-advertising businesses. Its fastest-growing business is Google Cloud, where it handles customers' AI workloads and helps them develop their own AI models and apps. It's even developed its own custom AI chips to help performance and lower costs. In addition, it has the leading robotaxi business in the U.S. with Waymo, and is at the forefront of quantum computing with its Willow chip. Alphabet has a collection of strong businesses, and the stock is just too cheap at its current valuation. Nvidia (P/E of 21.6) No company has been a bigger beneficiary of AI than Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA), which has seen its revenue surge more than 380% over the past two years. This growth has been powered by data center operators using its graphic processing units (GPUs) to power AI workloads. Cloud computing companies, such as Alphabet, are spending heavily to build out data center capacity to meet rising demand due to AI. Meanwhile, companies like Meta Platforms, OpenAI, and xAI are also investing heavily in infrastructure to build better AI models. One of the best ways to advance AI models is through increased computing power, which leads to the need for more GPUs. Nvidia's CUDA software platform is also able to enhance the efficiency and scalability of training AI models, which has helped create a wide moat for the company in the GPU space; that's a major reason that its GPU market share tops 80%. With AI still in its early innings, Nvidia still has years of solid growth in front of it. As such, the stock looks attractively priced at current levels. Salesforce (P/E of 21.9) The leader in customer relationship management (CRM), Salesforce (NYSE: CRM) is turning toward agentic AI to be its next big growth driver. One of the main selling points for its CRM platform has been that it gives its customers a unified view of all their siloed data, so they can get better real-time insights and improve forecasting. With AI agents seamlessly integrated into the Salesforce ecosystem, customers can now use AI agents to help with customer service, marketing, and sales. Salesforce offers pre-built agents designed for specific sectors like retail, healthcare, and financial services. However, users can also design their own AI agents through the no-code and low-code tools available within the platform. Salesforce has also created an AI agent marketplace with over 200 partners to add new actions and templates for its AI agents, expanding its use cases. Agentforce is a product with consumption-based pricing. It costs $2 per conversation. If its agents can demonstrate improved efficiency and cost savings, this could become a big growth driver for the company. The solution has already seen good initial demand, with 3,000 paid customers using the platform since its launch. With this big opportunity in front of it and a cheap stock price, Salesforce looks like a solid long-term option for investors. Should you invest $1,000 in Nvidia right now? Before you buy stock in Nvidia, consider this: The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the 10 best stocks for investors to buy now… and Nvidia wasn't one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years. Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $524,747!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $622,041!* Now, it's worth noting Stock Advisor 's total average return is792% — a market-crushing outperformance compared to153%for the S&P 500. Don't miss out on the latest top 10 list, available when you join Stock Advisor. See the 10 stocks » *Stock Advisor returns as of April 14, 2025
Yahoo
28-02-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
TipRanks' ‘Perfect 10' Picks: 2 Top-Scoring Stocks Flashing All the Right Signals
The market provides a vast array of data, the aggregated results of thousands of traders dealing in thousands of public stocks, for millions of daily transactions. This data gives investors all the signals they'll need to sort through the market and find the right stock, but the sheer volume is an intimidating barrier. See what stocks are receiving Strong Buy ratings from top-rated analysts. Filter, analyze, and streamline your search for investment opportunities with TipRanks' Stock Screener. This is where the Smart Score comes in. Developed by TipRanks, the Smart Score is an AI-powered natural language data-sorting algorithm, purpose-built to gather, collate, and, most importantly, use the volumes of stock market data. The Smart Score uses that data to rate every public stock against a set of factors that are known to correlate with future stock outperformance; in other words, these factors are good predictors of strong stocks. The results of the Smart Score's data analysis are presented as a simple score for each stock—a single-digit score on a scale of 1 to 10, with a 'Perfect 10' denoting a stock that investors should take a closer look at. We've opened up the TipRanks database to find two of these top-scoring 'Perfect 10' shares—stocks that are showing strong bullish indicators for investors. These stocks bring plenty of positive attributes to the table, including 'Strong Buy' ratings from analysts. Here are the details. Pinterest (PINS) We'll start our look at 'Perfect 10' stocks in the digital world, where Pinterest came on the scene in 2009 with a unique, image-centric approach to social media. The San Fran-based company gives its users online bulletin boards, which can be used to display various types of graphic and/or video content. Users publish and share this content, following the usual social media model; boards can be made public or private, as the owner wishes, and can also be sorted into categories for easier browsing. Pinterest's graphic orientation has proven strongly compatible with e-commerce, and Pinterest pages are frequently used as online storefronts by both established merchants and small-time sellers. The company is also making heavy investments in AI technology, applying it to the site's functionality in user searching and in bulletin board sorting and curation. For business users, Pinterest's Performance+ bundles both AI and automation features, designed to simplify and boost ad management and campaign creation while maximizing impressions. The user base for Pinterest skews toward both younger and female users, some 42% of the platform's global audience hailing from Gen Z and 70% being female. The Gen Z age cohort is Pinterest's fastest growing demographic, within a user base that is, generally, growing rapidly. At the end of 2024, Pinterest reported its global monthly active users (MAU) had reached 553 million, for year-over-year growth of 11%. Strong user growth has led to solid revenue and earnings growth – although the Q4 results did not fully meet the expectations. Finishing 2024, Pinterest reported $1.15 billion in revenue for Q4 – a figure that was up 17% year-over-year and beat the forecast by $10 million. Full-year revenue for 2024 came to $3.65 billion, up 19% from 2023. At the same time, Pinterest's 4Q24 non-GAAP earnings of 56 cents per share, while up 3 cents per share from the prior-year quarter, did miss the forecast by 9 cents. Looking forward, Pinterest management has presented 1Q25 revenue guidance in the range of $837 million to $852 million, which would represent year-over-year growth of 13% to 15%. In addition, the company has stated that it plans to continue its AI development and related product initiatives, including additional Performance+ functionalities scheduled to be rolled out this year. This social media company has caught the attention of Benchmark analyst Mark Zgutowicz, who notes that while Pinterest has had its share of troubles in the past, the company is on track for continued gains. The 5-star analyst writes, 'We have long been challenged by PINS' inconsistent engagement and monetization dynamics; however, we believe these forces are now in sync, aided by AI efficiencies and 2.5 years (and counting) of lower funnel product maturation. Said differently, PINS historic (monetization) under indexing of its billions of unique 1P data now looks rearview. While UCAN ARPU has lagged Europe and ROW acceleration the past few quarters, total developed market engagement improvement y/y suggests 1QE's projected revenue acceleration is not temporary. In addition, Performance+ lower funnel optimization/creative products have yet to monetize, suggesting a P+ call option on a compressed share price.' Based on his upbeat appraisal of the company, Zgutowicz rates Pinterest's stock as a Buy, with a $55 price target that points toward a one-year gain of 49%. (To watch Zgutowicz's track record, click here.) Pinterest has earned a Strong Buy rating from the analyst consensus, based on 30 recent analyst reviews that include 24 to Buy and 6 to Hold. The shares are currently trading for $36.88 and their $46 average target price implies an upside of 25% on the one-year horizon. (See PINS stock forecast.) Crown Holdings (CCK) Next on our list of 'Perfect 10s' is a stock that has probably slipped under your radar – but most of us have used its products. Crown Holdings traces its roots back to 1892, and from its Florida headquarters, the company oversees a network of 195 facilities in 39 countries around the world – manufacturing, marketing, and distributing a wide range of metal packaging products, including food and beverage cans, aerosol containers, and various specialty packaging, including metal closures. Crown's products are widespread – if you've ever popped open a beer or a can of soda or opened up a can of soup, there's a good chance that you've used one of this company's metal cans. Food packaging is hardly an industry that anyone would ever call exciting, but it is ubiquitous, and a successful packaging manufacturer can build both a solid reputation and a solid sales base. Crown has both. That is evident in the numbers. In 4Q24, Crown beat the forecasts for both revenue and earnings in the quarter. Quarterly revenue came in at $2.9 billion, for a modest 1.4% year-over-year gain and beating the estimates by $10 million, while the non-GAAP EPS in Q4, at $1.59, was 8 cents better than had been anticipated – and was up 28% year-over-year. Of particular interest to investors, Crown's full-year 2024 operating cash flow came to $1.19 billion, and the adjusted free cash flow of $814 million was a company record. Management has stated that it expects the 2025 full-year free cash flow to remain at high levels and expects to see approximately $800 million in FCF this year. In recent years, the company has made a commitment to give cash back to shareholders and in the past year has made a sharp increase in share repurchases. Analyst Ghansham Panjabi covers this stock for Baird. He has taken note of the company's combination of modest growth and sound returns – and sees it as an attractive profile. Panjabi writes of CCK, 'While the operating model for Crown Holdings is once again gravitating around low growth and productivity/cash flow maximization, we believe that the latter, with an overlay of disproportionate return of cash flow to shareholders 2025 onwards, underpins an attractive and defensive investment profile—with management consistently executing on the operations relative to mixed performance across the peer group… We believe that boring is good in the case of the metal beverage can industry, with Crown in the early stages of returning significant cash to shareholders.' Panjabi goes on to rate CCK shares as Outperform (Buy), and he puts a $105 price target here, suggesting that the stock has a 19% upside potential for the coming year. (To watch Panjabi's track record, click here.) The 12 recent analyst reviews on Crown's stock break down to 10 Buys and 2 Holds, for a Strong Buy consensus rating. The shares are priced at $88.06 and have an average target price of $108.18, implying a potential one-year upside of 23%. (See CCK stock forecast.) To find good ideas for stocks trading at attractive valuations, visit TipRanks' Best Stocks to Buy, a tool that unites all of TipRanks' equity insights. Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the featured analysts. The content is intended to be used for informational purposes only. It is very important to do your own analysis before making any investment. Sign in to access your portfolio
Reuters
07-02-2025
- Business
- Reuters
Pinterest shares jump as AI advertisement tools drive forecasts
Feb 7 (Reuters) - Pinterest's (PINS.N), opens new tab shares rose 20% on Friday as it forecast first-quarter revenue above estimates, indicating that its AI-powered tools would spur ad spend on the image sharing platform. Pinterest has focused on direct response ads, designed to prompt specific actions like app downloads or website visits. Investments in AI tools such as its Performance+ suite for improving targeting of ads with automation are also helping Pinterest. CEO Bill Ready said advertisers that were using these tools required 50% fewer inputs to create a campaign now. "If you're a smaller ad platform, the less time and more automated you can make it for the advertisers, the easier it is to get them to try you out," Bernstein analyst Mark Shmulik said. "We think the progress Pinterest has shown is sustainable." The social media firm also posted record revenue in the fourth quarter as strength in advertising from retail, technology and financial services sectors offset the ongoing weakness in marketing spend from food and beverage. At least 27 brokerages raised their price target on Pinterest after its latest earnings report. The company is set to add more than $4 billion in its market value if gains hold. As of last close, it had a market valuation of $22.70 billion. Pinterest's shares often react wildly after its earnings reports. They dropped 14% after the company's weak holiday quarter forecast in November, but the stock rose 21% a day after it reported first quarter results in April last year. The company's first-quarter revenue forecast of $837 million to $852 million was above analysts' average estimate of $832.8 million, according to data compiled by LSEG. Its adjusted core earnings forecast of $155 million to $170 million was also ahead of analysts' estimates. In the fourth quarter, revenue of $1.15 billion was slightly ahead of estimates. Global monthly active users were 553 million. Pinterest currently trades at 17.88 times the estimates of its earnings for the next 12 months, compared with 27.37 times for Meta and Snap's 25.40 times.
Zawya
07-02-2025
- Business
- Zawya
Pinterest projects revenue above estimates as AI tools boost ad spend; shares jump
Pinterest forecast first-quarter revenue above market estimates on Thursday, betting on the image-sharing platform's artificial intelligence-powered advertising tools to boost ad spend, sending its shares up 19% in extended trading. The forecast followed better-than-expected record monthly active users and revenue during the fourth quarter, thanks to a robust holiday shopping season. Advertisers turn to Pinterest for its AI-driven ad tools such as Performance+ suite, designed to help advertisers better target users with automation features. "Our strategy is paying off. People are coming to Pinterest more often, the platform has never been more actionable," CEO Bill Ready said in a statement. Rising Gen Z users and new shoppable content have made the platform more lucrative for marketers. That is bolstered by Pinterest's third-party ad deals with Google and which are expanding and helping the company to diversify its revenue streams. "Pinterest has strong global engagement, but the ad dollars are still disproportionately tied to North America," said Jeremy Goldman, senior director of briefings at eMarketer. "Expanding third-party ad integrations could open up new revenue streams, but execution here has historically been slow." Ecommerce merchants such as those on Shopify or Adobe Commerce can integrate their products into Pinterest by using platform-specific extensions that are offered by the company. Its first-quarter revenue forecast of $837 million to $852 million was above analysts' average estimate of $832.8 million, according to data compiled by LSEG. The company expects adjusted core earnings of $155 million to $170 million, above the average estimate of $140.8 million. Global monthly active users on the platform were at an all-time high of 553 million, exceeding estimates of 545.8 million. They rose 11% from a year earlier. Revenue in the fourth quarter ended December 31 grew 18% to $1.15 billion, compared with estimates of $1.14 billion. Adjusted profit per share of 56 cents missed estimates of 65 cents due to certain tax adjustments in the quarter. (Reporting by Jaspreet Singh in Bengaluru; Editing by Maju Samuel)
