VNET Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:VNET) Short Interest Update

VNET Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:VNET) was the target of a significant growth in short interest during the month of March. As of March 15th, there was short interest totalling 32,500,000 shares, a growth of 53.1% from the February 28th total of 21,230,000 shares. Currently, 14.4% of the company’s stock are short sold. Based on an average daily trading volume, of 9,200,000 shares, the days-to-cover ratio is presently 3.5 days.

Analysts Set New Price Targets

VNET has been the topic of a number of recent research reports. Citigroup increased their target price on VNET Group from $16.10 to $20.00 and gave the stock a “buy” rating in a research note on Friday, March 14th. StockNews.com cut shares of VNET Group from a “hold” rating to a “sell” rating in a report on Friday, March 14th. Finally, Nomura Securities upgraded shares of VNET Group to a “strong-buy” rating in a report on Friday, February 21st. One analyst has rated the stock with a sell rating, four have given a buy rating and two have assigned a strong buy rating to the company. Based on data from MarketBeat.com, the company presently has an average rating of “Buy” and a consensus target price of $9.30.

VNET Group Stock Performance

Shares of NASDAQ VNET opened at $8.25 on Friday. The firm’s 50-day moving average price is $10.00 and its 200-day moving average price is $6.06. VNET Group has a 52-week low of $1.42 and a 52-week high of $16.13. The company has a market cap of $2.12 billion, a PE ratio of -3.72, a PEG ratio of 1.01 and a beta of 0.07. The company has a quick ratio of 0.83, a current ratio of 0.83 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 1.46.

VNET Group (NASDAQ:VNET) last issued its earnings results on Wednesday, March 12th. The information technology services provider reported ($0.01) earnings per share (EPS) for the quarter, missing the consensus estimate of $0.03 by ($0.04). The company had revenue of $307.75 million during the quarter, compared to analysts’ expectations of $284.88 million. VNET Group had a negative return on equity of 5.68% and a negative net margin of 28.54%. As a group, analysts anticipate that VNET Group will post -0.06 EPS for the current year.

Institutional Trading of VNET Group

Several large investors have recently modified their holdings of the company. Barclays PLC grew its stake in shares of VNET Group by 229.3% during the 4th quarter. Barclays PLC now owns 7,093 shares of the information technology services provider’s stock valued at $34,000 after purchasing an additional 4,939 shares during the period. Point72 Asia Singapore Pte. Ltd. purchased a new stake in VNET Group during the fourth quarter valued at approximately $41,000. Wolverine Trading LLC bought a new position in VNET Group in the third quarter worth approximately $46,000. Catalina Capital Group LLC bought a new position in VNET Group in the fourth quarter worth approximately $54,000. Finally, Hsbc Holdings PLC purchased a new position in shares of VNET Group during the 4th quarter worth $66,000. Institutional investors own 72.83% of the company’s stock.

About VNET Group

VNET Group, Inc, an investment holding company, provides hosting and related services in China. It offers managed hosting services consisting of managed retail services, such as colocation services that dedicate data center space to house customers' servers and networking equipment, as well as allow customers to lease partial or entire cabinets for their servers; interconnectivity services that allow customers to connect their servers; value-added services, including hybrid IT, bare metal, firewall, server load balancing, data backup and recovery, data center management, server management, and backup server services; cloud services that allow customers to run applications over the internet using IT infrastructure; and VPN Services that extend customers' private networks by setting up connections through the public internet.