Morgan Stanley believes that things look up from here Akamai Technologies . The bank double upgraded the cybersecurity and cloud computing stock to overweight from underweight. Analyst Sanjit Singh also hiked his price target to $115 from $83, which implies upside of 31%. The analysts said that, with shares trading at around 11 times earnings per share for the 2027 calendar year, they look attractive. He added that investors have seemingly “underpriced” Akamai’s potential for improving growth. AKAM 1Y mountain AKAM 1Y chart “We now believe Akamai is approaching an important inflection point in its long-term business model evolution that should enable better top-line growth and faster EPS growth in the years ahead,” he wrote. Coming out of the pandemic, overall revenue growth for Akamai has been stuck in a range of between 4% to 5%, Singh wrote. The company’s earnings per share has also been growing at a similar annual rate since 2021. But the analyst now believes that key drivers for better revenue growth include the stabilization of Akamai’s content delivery business, sustained high-single-digit growth in security and accelerating growth into the high teens for its compute business. “Importantly, we think growing contribution from the public cloud unit (Linode) and the recently launched Akamai Inference Cloud (an NVIDIA GPU-as-a-Service for inference offering) can not only help accelerate growth in the Compute business but also serve as a catalyst for overall multiple re-rating,” the analyst added. Shares of Akamai have slipped 1% over the past 12 months. On Monday, they gained more than 4% following the double upgrade.
