Financial giant Morgan Stanley has previously rated professional networking platform LinkedIn Corp. with a fairly bullish rating, stating that the company's stocks are "overweight." As LinkedIn continues to show slowing growth, however, the bank has finally taken a step back from its initial evaluation, downgrading the platform's stocks to "equal-weight."
During its previous rating, Morgan Stanley gave LinkedIn a pretty hefty $190 price target. With the new valuation, however, the professional social media platform' s price target has been significantly brought down to $125.
For all intents and purposes, Morgan Stanley is telling its clients that they were wrong about LinkedIn. Simply put, the bank is stating that it has overestimated the growth of the professional networking platform.
Brian Nowak, an analyst at Morgan Stanley, stated on Wednesday that recent headwinds have prompted the bank to lower LinkedIn's rating.
"Fourth-quarter results, full-year guidance, decelerating customer growth from large companies and recent management commentary on strategic investments "make us believe we have overestimated LinkedIn's ability to grow its platform and underestimated the investment needed to grow," he wrote.
Immediately after the downgrade, LinkedIn's stocks plunged, falling 3.7 percent to $111.30 in Wednesday's pre-market trading. During the day, the company's shares went down as much as 6.6 percent to $107.99.
It has not been a good year for LinkedIn. Since the start of the year, the professional networking platform's stocks have plunged 51 percent, far worse than other known underperforming stocks such as Yahoo! which was up 2 percent in 2016.
According to Nowak, the primary reason behind LinkedIn's poor performance is its slowing growth in both enterprise and talent solutions. Though the platform's corporate solutions customers have grown through the years, the rate upon which the numbers are growing is far less impressive than what analysts originally thought.
"LinkedIn isn't likely to be as big of a platform as we previously thought," Nowak said.
Despite the setback, however, it is not all over for LinkedIn yet. Though its rating has dropped, analysts believe that it is still a company that might be able to save its future, especially since the firm has only recently breached China, a potentially lucrative market.
Overall, even with its rating being lowered, LinkedIn remains a very solid business. Its investors simply need to accept a reset regarding the company's growth expectations and other related valuation metrics.
