Citigroup Forecasts Strong Price Appreciation for VNET Group (NASDAQ:VNET) Stock

VNET Group (NASDAQ:VNET) had its target price lifted by research analysts at Citigroup from $16.10 to $20.00 in a research note issued to investors on Friday,Benzinga reports. The brokerage presently has a “buy” rating on the information technology services provider’s stock. Citigroup’s target price suggests a potential upside of 73.43% from the company’s previous close.

A number of other equities analysts also recently commented on the stock. The Goldman Sachs Group upgraded shares of VNET Group from a “neutral” rating to a “buy” rating and upped their price objective for the stock from $3.10 to $5.00 in a research report on Friday, November 29th. Nomura Securities upgraded shares of VNET Group to a “strong-buy” rating in a report on Friday, February 21st. Finally, UBS Group raised their target price on shares of VNET Group from $6.40 to $7.00 and gave the company a “buy” rating in a report on Friday, November 29th. One equities research analyst has rated the stock with a hold rating, five have issued a buy rating and two have given a strong buy rating to the stock. According to data from MarketBeat.com, VNET Group currently has an average rating of “Buy” and a consensus target price of $7.98.

VNET Group Price Performance

Shares of NASDAQ VNET traded up $1.13 during trading on Friday, hitting $11.53. The company had a trading volume of 8,263,483 shares, compared to its average volume of 9,914,340. The stock has a fifty day simple moving average of $9.09 and a two-hundred day simple moving average of $5.51. VNET Group has a fifty-two week low of $1.42 and a fifty-two week high of $16.13. The firm has a market capitalization of $2.97 billion, a price-to-earnings ratio of -5.17, a price-to-earnings-growth ratio of 1.01 and a beta of 0.06. The company has a quick ratio of 0.83, a current ratio of 0.83 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 1.46.

VNET Group (NASDAQ:VNET) last posted its quarterly earnings results on Wednesday, March 12th. The information technology services provider reported ($0.01) earnings per share for the quarter, missing analysts’ consensus estimates of $0.03 by ($0.04). The business had revenue of $307.75 million for the quarter, compared to analyst estimates of $284.88 million. VNET Group had a negative return on equity of 5.68% and a negative net margin of 28.54%. On average, research analysts expect that VNET Group will post -0.06 earnings per share for the current year.

Institutional Investors Weigh In On VNET Group

Hedge funds and other institutional investors have recently modified their holdings of the company. Barclays PLC grew its holdings in shares of VNET Group by 229.3% during the fourth quarter. Barclays PLC now owns 7,093 shares of the information technology services provider’s stock worth $34,000 after buying an additional 4,939 shares in the last quarter. Point72 Asia Singapore Pte. Ltd. purchased a new stake in shares of VNET Group during the fourth quarter worth about $41,000. Wolverine Trading LLC purchased a new stake in shares of VNET Group during the third quarter worth about $46,000. Catalina Capital Group LLC purchased a new stake in shares of VNET Group during the fourth quarter worth about $54,000. Finally, Hsbc Holdings PLC purchased a new stake in VNET Group in the fourth quarter valued at approximately $66,000. 72.83% of the stock is currently owned by hedge funds and other institutional investors.

VNET Group Company Profile

VNET Group, Inc, an investment holding company, provides hosting and related services in China. It offers managed hosting services consisting of managed retail services, such as colocation services that dedicate data center space to house customers' servers and networking equipment, as well as allow customers to lease partial or entire cabinets for their servers; interconnectivity services that allow customers to connect their servers; value-added services, including hybrid IT, bare metal, firewall, server load balancing, data backup and recovery, data center management, server management, and backup server services; cloud services that allow customers to run applications over the internet using IT infrastructure; and VPN Services that extend customers' private networks by setting up connections through the public internet.