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Amazon may be the ultimate beneficiary in the post-coronavirus world, CNBC’s Jim Cramer said Wednesday, suggesting the company’s cloud unit and e-commerce business are both positioned nicely to thrive.
“I think Amazon could go to $3,000 in this market,” Cramer said on “Squawk on the Street.” That would represent a more than 37% increase over last month’s all-time high.
Since its Feb. 11 record, Amazon has dropped 11% as of Tuesday’s close of $1,940 per share. While lower, the stock has held up much better than that S&P 500, which has seen a nearly 28% decline from last month’s highs.
Another way to look at it, an Amazon rise from $1,940 per share to $3,000 would be an almost 55% gain.
Cramer believes Amazon is posed for such a strong move to the upside because the coronavirus pandemic has ushered in a new reality. “The world has changed,” he added. “Very few people I know want to admit this.”
On Friday, the “Mad Money” host suggested Amazon, Walmart and Costco may be the only three retailers to survive the economic shock from the coronavirus.
Amazon’s e-commerce business has surged during the outbreak as people look to stock up on essentials. Last week, the company announced plans to hire 100,000 warehouse and delivery workers to help keep up with demand.
Cramer said that in addition to more people changing their habits to shop online, Amazon Web Services stands to benefit from a shift to work-from-home.
The AWS cloud side of Amazon had already been booming before the crisis, accounting for over half of the company’s operating income in its most recent quarter.
“Amazon Web Services must be just crushing it,” said Cramer, who argued the temporary work-from-home policies put in place to increase social distancing may usher in permanent adoption at least some companies.
Indeed, Slack and Zoom — two apps that have benefited from the recent stay-at-home existence — rely at least partially on AWS to run their services, CNBC has reported.
Cramer is not alone in observing how Amazon, already facing antitrust scrutiny, was seemingly positioned perfectly in e-commerce and the cloud to expand its dominance.
“All of this activity to deal with the coronavirus that countries are taking could be relabeled the ‘Amazon Subsidy Act of 2020,'” noted value investor Bill Miller told CNBC last week.
