Amazon Could Be Worth US$3 Trillion in Three Years, Analyst Says

In a research note on Tuesday, Jefferies analyst Brent Thill lays out a case that Amazon (Ticker: AMZN) can reach US$5,700 a share over the next three years, a potential 70% gain that would boost the company’s valuation to nearly US$3 trillion.

Thill, who maintains a Buy rating on Amazon shares with a current price target of $4,000, notes that the stock has been stuck in neutral since last August, but thinks the stock will outperform again when the market gets clarity on the direction of the core retail business. He cautions that overall revenue growth will be a key driver of stock performance and that the shares could be range-bound until moving past what he warns will be a tough June quarter comparison. But for the long haul, he’s all in.

The analyst asserts that Amazon Web Services is the company’s most valuable business, and one that is well-positioned for further strong growth. He thinks AWS could be worth $1.2 trillion in three years, as more corporate computing workloads shift to the cloud. (Barron’s notes there are only four companies with market caps higher than that: Amazon itself, Apple, Microsoft and Alphabet.)

In a finding that could surprise some investors, Thill thinks the company’s advertising business could be worth more than $600 billion in three years. “As Amazon becomes an increasingly important channel for [consumer-packaged goods] companies, we believe a portion of their spending will shift toward search and product placement,” he writes. “In addition, we think Amazon has the opportunity to expand advertising further in international and new channels like Prime Video.”

As for the core retail business, the analyst estimates the value three years out at US$1 trillion, about US$700 billion of that for the third-party seller business. “[Amazon] Prime adoption and a broader shift to e-commerce have driven an acceleration in growth,” he writes. “We believe the length of the pandemic has served to engrain consumers’ increased reliance on e-commerce.”

Thill is careful to say that his sum-of-the-parts analysis is simply illustrative and doesn’t reflect his official price target. But he adds that viewing Amazon over a longer time period “helps provide perspective in the face of near-term disruptions/volatility from the pandemic.” He also thinks Amazon’s discount to its underlying asset value can narrow over time. And Thill points out that he is not including any value for its new healthcare business, which he notes is addressing a $350 billion U.S. market.

Amazon closed Tuesday at US$3,399.92, up 0.6%.

As tech leaders race to bring Windows systems back online after Friday’s software update by cybersecurity company CrowdStrike crashed around 8.5 million machines worldwide, experts share with CIO Journal their takeaways for preparing for the next major information technology outage.

Be familiar with how vendors develop, test and release their software

IT leaders should hold vendors deeply integrated within IT systems, such as CrowdStrike , to a “very high standard” of development, release quality and assurance, said Neil MacDonald , a Gartner vice president.

“Any security vendor has a responsibility to do extensive regression testing on all versions of Windows before an update is rolled out,” he said.

That involves asking existing vendors to explain how they write software, what testing they do and whether customers may choose how quickly to roll out an update.

“Incidents like this remind all of us in the CIO community of the importance of ensuring availability, reliability and security by prioritizing guardrails such as deployment and testing procedures and practices,” said Amy Farrow, chief information officer of IT automation and security company Infoblox.

Re-evaluate how your firm accepts software updates from ‘trusted’ vendors

While automatically accepting software updates has become the norm—and a recommended security practice—the CrowdStrike outage is a reminder to take a pause, some CIOs said.

“We still should be doing the full testing of packages and upgrades and new features,” said Paul Davis, a field chief information security officer at software development platform maker JFrog . undefined undefined Though it’s not feasible to test every update, especially for as many as hundreds of software vendors, Davis said he makes it a priority to test software patches according to their potential severity and size.

Automation, and maybe even artificial intelligence-based IT tools, can help.

“Humans are not very good at catching errors in thousands of lines of code,” said Jack Hidary, chief executive of AI and quantum company SandboxAQ. “We need AI trained to look for the interdependence of new software updates with the existing stack of software.”

Develop a disaster recovery plan

An incident rendering Windows computers unusable is similar to a natural disaster with systems knocked offline, said Gartner’s MacDonald. That’s why businesses should consider natural disaster recovery plans for maintaining the resiliency of their operations.

One way to do that is to set up a “clean room,” or an environment isolated from other systems, to use to bring critical systems back online, according to Chirag Mehta, a cybersecurity analyst at Constellation Research.

Businesses should also hold tabletop exercises to simulate risk scenarios, including IT outages and potential cyber threats, Mehta said.

Companies that back up data regularly were likely less impacted by the CrowdStrike outage, according to Victor Zyamzin, chief business officer of security company Qrator Labs. “Another suggestion for companies, and we’ve been saying that again and again for decades, is that you should have some backup procedure applied, running and regularly tested,” he said.

Review vendor and insurance contracts

For any vendor with a significant impact on company operations , MacDonald said companies can review their contracts and look for clauses indicating the vendors must provide reliable and stable software.

“That’s where you may have an advantage to say, if an update causes an outage, is there a clause in the contract that would cover that?” he said.

If it doesn’t, tech leaders can aim to negotiate a discount serving as a form of compensation at renewal time, MacDonald added.

The outage also highlights the importance of insurance in providing companies with bottom-line protection against cyber risks, said Peter Halprin, a partner with law firm Haynes Boone focused on cyber insurance.

This coverage can include protection against business income losses, such as those associated with an outage, whether caused by the insured company or a service provider, Halprin said.

Weigh the advantages and disadvantages of the various platforms

The CrowdStrike update affected only devices running Microsoft Windows-based systems , prompting fresh questions over whether enterprises should rely on Windows computers.

CrowdStrike runs on Windows devices through access to the kernel, the part of an operating system containing a computer’s core functions. That’s not the same for Apple ’s Mac operating system and Linux, which don’t allow the same level of access, said Mehta.

Some businesses have converted to Chromebooks , simple laptops developed by Alphabet -owned Google that run on the Chrome operating system . “Not all of them require deeper access to things,” Mehta said. “What are you doing on your laptop that actually requires Windows?”