Stock Update (NASDAQ:MSFT): Salesforce is a King Maker for Amazon, Says Citi

[at Barrons.com] – Citigroup’s Mark May today reiterates a Buy rating on shares of cloud computing titan Salesforce.com (CRM) after the company yesterday said it would use Amazon.com’s (AMZN) Amazon Web Services to expand its offerings into Canada and Australia. May, who has a Buy rating on Salesforce shares, and a $97 price target, thinks this is evidence that Salesforce is among those companies that are “king makers” for cloud, with Amazon and Microsoft (MSFT) chasing their patronage. Read more on this. Microsoft Corporation (MSFT) , valued at $406.62B, started trading this morning at $51.90. A quick look at the market, the company’s stock traded between $51.36 and $51.97 with its 52-week range being $39.72 to $56.85. MSFT shares are currently priced at 19.59x this year’s forecasted earnings, which makes them relatively expensive compared to the industry’s 7.34x earnings multiple for the same period. And for income investors, the company pays shareholders $1.44 per share annually in dividends, yielding 2.88%. Consensus earnings for the current quarter by the 29 sell-side analysts covering the stock is an estimate of $0.58 per share, which would be $0.02 worse than the year-ago quarter and a $0.09 sequential decrease. What we find to be interesting is that the full-year EPS estimate of $2.66 is a $0.20 improvement when compared to the previous year’s annual results. The quarterly earnings estimate is predicated on a consensus revenue forecast of $22.17 Billion. If reported, that would be a 0.05% decrease over the year-ago quarter. In terms of ratings, Macquarie Initiated MSFT at Neutral (Mar 4, 2016). Previously, Morgan Stanley upgraded MSFT from Equal-Weight to Overweight. When considering if the stock is under or overvalued, the average price target is $57.66, which is 11.10% above where the stock opened this morning. See more in (NASDAQ:MSFT) Similar Articles: Stock Update: Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) – How Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella plans to beat Amazon in the cloud Market Update (NASDAQ:MSFT): Salesforce Expands Machine-Learning Service to Microsoft Outlook Company Update (NASDAQ:MSFT): Microsoft Buys SwiftKey, Maker of Popular iOS, Android Keyboards