Pinterest stock gains after Morgan Stanley upgrade
Shares of Pinterest Inc. (PINS) are up 1.4% in Monday morning trading after Morgan Stanley analyst Brian Nowak upgraded the stock to overweight from equal weight and raised his price target to $44 from $34. The company is "driving/benefitting from accelerating e-commerce and social shopping," Nowak wrote in a note to clients. He likened Pinterest and Facebook Inc. (FB) to "social online malls" that could become increasingly important with the COVID-19 crisis changing the way people shop. Pinterest is the "purest play" on this trend, in Nowak's view, as the company saw a big surge in user growth in the second quarter and now is in a place to monetize this heightened engagement with better targeting capabilities and automatic bidding for traffic objectives. Such improvements helped drive "structurally faster ad growth" for Facebook, Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN), and Snap Inc. (SNAP) in the past, and now Nowak expects that Pinterest could see similar trends. Pinterest shares have gained 79% over the past three months as the S&P 500 has increased 14%.
-Emily Bary; 415-439-6400; AskNewswires@dowjones.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
August 10, 2020 11:19 ET (15:19 GMT)
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