Chewy downgraded to Peer Perform from Outperform at Wolfe Research

Wolfe Research analyst Deepak Mathivanan downgraded Chewy to Peer Perform from Outperform without a price target. The analyst also downgraded the e-commerce sector to Market Weight from Market Overweight. Given the high penetration, e-commerce growth is likely to show high sensitivity to retail sales and consumer spending trends during the macroeconomic slowdown in 2023, Mathivanan tells investors in a research note. In addition, sales growth for many companies in the space benefited from inflationary tailwinds in 2022, which should be a less significant factor in 2023, says the analyst. Mathivanan also thinks consensus estimates "are still elevated in many cases." He thinks growth deceleration under a weakening macro could have high sensitivity on Chewy’s multiple.