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Fastly Inc. shares pulled back from their recent lofty heights Thursday, as analysts weighed in on how the popular video-sharing platform TikTok will affect the edge-computing platform’s growth as more businesses migrate functions to the cloud.
Fastly FSLY, -18.01% shares fell as much as 21% Thursday, and were last down 17% at $90.40, on volume of more than 23 million shares, compared with a 52-week average daily volume of 3.4 million shares.
Late Wednesday, Fastly reported quarterly results and an outlook that topped Wall Street estimates, but revealed that TikTok was the company’s single largest customer, accounting for 12% of revenue. Fastly is a so-called “edge-based” cloud-computing platform that allows developers to get the best possible performance from their applications.
TikTok has come under fire from President Donald Trump, who has suggested banning the service as a national-security risk because of ownership by the Chinese company ByteDance. Trump has also suggested that the U.S. Treasury should get a cut of the purchase price if TikTok is acquired by Microsoft Corp. MSFT, +1.21%. Also of note, organized TikTok users were credited with helping to wildly inflate attendance expectations of Trump’s ill-attended Tulsa, Oklahoma rally back in June.
Even with Thursday’s drop, Fastly shares have soared 324% from their opening on the New York Stock Exchange in May 2019, with shares skyrocketing 294% in the past three months. In comparison, the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite Index COMP, +0.94% has gained 25% in the past three months, and the S&P 500 index SPX, +0.56% has risen 17%.
Oppenheimer analyst Timothy Horan downgraded Fastly to perform from outperform and said TikTok was a “major risk” to the elevated stock price.
“A TikTok ban in the U.S. could prevent FSLY from hitting 3Q/FY20 guidance,” Horan said. “TikTok is FSLY’s largest customer and is likely ~15% of revenues in 1H20, with about half that generated in the U.S. We do think a TikTok/ MSFT deal is far from certain, and long-term MSFT could move TikTok delivery on its own edge infrastructure.”
For the third quarter, Fastly forecast an adjusted loss of a penny a share to net income of a penny a share on revenue of $73.5 million to $75.5 million. Analysts, who had previously forecast a loss of 4 cents a share on revenue of $72 million on average, now expect earnings of a penny a share on revenue of $74.8 million.
Read:Facebook’s TikTok rival comes as Chinese company’s future is in limbo
William Blair analyst Jonathan Ho, who has an outperform rating on the stock, said weakness could make a good entry point given its recent performance, even with a possible U.S. ban of TikTok.
“Third-quarter guidance calls for sequentially flat revenue growth, which appears conservative but also reflects some unknowns around TikTok and continued COVID-19-driven demand as global economies reopen,” Ho said. “Fastly remains a stock we would want to own given broader themes around digital transformation and edge compute, and we would take advantage of weakness in the shares.”
Raymond James analyst Robert Majek, who rates the stock as market perform, said TikTok “remains a double-edged sword” for Fastly.
Majek said one “area of perceived softness” in Fastly’s results was slowing growth in its large enterprise customers, which could reflect a COVID-19 related pullback in spending, but noted the addition of a very significant customer.
“We note that the gross adds included one very meaningful customer, Amazon AMZN, +0.93%, which we believe is using Fastly to deliver ~90% of its image content across the 20 global cities we tested,” Majek said.
Stifel analyst Brad Reback, who has a buy rating and hiked his price target to $98 from $30, noted that while 12% of Fastly’s revenue came from TikTok, half of that came from outside of the U.S., and that digital transformation trends, prompted by COVID-19 adaptation, would drive more organizations to “re-platform their applications” using Fastly.
“The banning of the app in the US would create short-term uncertainty around Fastly’s revenue contribution from ByteDance; however, management believes it has the ability to backfill the majority of this potentially lost traffic,” Reback said.
Of the 11 analysts who cover Fastly, five have buy or overweight ratings, four have hold ratings, and two have sell ratings, and an average target price of $93.25, according to FactSet data.
