VNET Group (NASDAQ:VNET) Trading Up 7.7% on Analyst Upgrade

VNET Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:VNET) traded up 7.7% during mid-day trading on Friday after Citigroup raised their price target on the stock from $16.10 to $20.00. Citigroup currently has a buy rating on the stock. VNET Group traded as high as $11.46 and last traded at $11.21. 2,827,502 shares changed hands during trading, a decline of 71% from the average session volume of 9,788,974 shares. The stock had previously closed at $10.40.

VNET has been the topic of several other research reports. UBS Group upped their price target on VNET Group from $6.40 to $7.00 and gave the company a “buy” rating in a 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, The Goldman Sachs Group upgraded shares of VNET Group from a “neutral” rating to a “buy” rating and boosted their price target for the company from $3.10 to $5.00 in a report on Friday, November 29th. One equities research analyst has rated the stock with a sell rating, five have assigned a buy rating and two have given a strong buy rating to the company. According to data from MarketBeat, the company presently has an average rating of “Buy” and an average target price of $7.98.

Institutional Inflows and Outflows

Several institutional investors have recently added to or reduced their stakes in the business. Vident Advisory LLC increased its position in VNET Group by 91.6% in the 4th quarter. Vident Advisory LLC now owns 283,296 shares of the information technology services provider’s stock worth $1,343,000 after buying an additional 135,467 shares during the period. Squarepoint Ops LLC acquired a new stake in VNET Group in the 4th quarter valued at $132,000. Two Sigma Investments LP acquired a new stake in VNET Group in the 4th quarter valued at $2,911,000. Triata Capital Ltd acquired a new stake in VNET Group in the 4th quarter valued at $47,377,000. Finally, Sig Brokerage LP acquired a new position in VNET Group in the fourth quarter worth $270,000. 72.83% of the stock is owned by institutional investors.

VNET Group Trading Up 12.0 %

The company has a market cap of $3.00 billion, a price-to-earnings ratio of -5.25, a price-to-earnings-growth ratio of 1.01 and a beta of 0.06. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 1.46, a current ratio of 0.83 and a quick ratio of 0.83. The business has a 50 day simple moving average of $9.23 and a 200 day simple moving average of $5.60.

VNET Group (NASDAQ:VNET) last released its 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 firm had revenue of $307.75 million for the quarter, compared to the consensus estimate of $284.88 million. VNET Group had a negative return on equity of 5.68% and a negative net margin of 28.54%. As a group, equities analysts forecast that VNET Group, Inc. will post -0.06 EPS for the current year.

About VNET Group

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.