Piper ups Amazon target, says now is the time to buy

Piper Sandler raised the firm’s price target on Amazon.com to $185 from $175 and keeps an Overweight rating on the shares. The analyst says a second look at comments from the company’s Q2 earnings call suggest Amazon may have reached a new threshold in shipping and fulfillment cost efficiency. The firm sees evidence of this emerging in gross margins and says the Q3 incremental operating income guidance “was by far the strongest in company history.” Now is the time to buy Amazon.com with margins inflecting ad Web Services growth troughing, the analyst tells investors in a research note. Piper views Amazon as a “must-own growth name” for the second half of 2023.