Verona Pharma (VRNA) PT Raised to $72 at Canaccord Genuity

Canaccord Genuity analyst Edward Nash raised the price target on Verona Pharma (NASDAQ: VRNA) to $72.00 (from $44.00) while maintaining a Buy rating.

The analyst commented: "There are a lot of things going right for Shopify, but it is without a doubt an expensive stock to own. Larger brands are increasingly moving to Shopify given the flexibility of the model at the high end (Plus, headless/Hydrogen, Composable, etc.); international continues to go well, as GMV growth outside of N. America outpaced by 10-points and the firm continues to localize the platform for new markets; payment penetration continues to increase, up 4-points year over year, and Shop Pay is now 38% of GPV, a positive sign of continued share gains; and newer efforts like POS and B2B continue to put up healthy growth rates, signaling that Shopify is having success opening up new growth vectors. We thought management said it well, “we’re not just taking a larger piece of the pie, we’re growing the pie as well.” Bottom line, if you put valuation aside for the moment, there’s not a lot of areas to poke holes in the Shopify story or recent execution. This is a firm that has put up 7 consecutive quarters of pro-forma
revenue growth >25%, and they crossed into delivering Rule of 50 metrics in Q4, which is pretty impressive. In our experience, owning category leading firms in large secular growth markets (Shopify still has only 12% N. American e-commerce share and far less on a global commerce basis) is generally a good play in software. High valuations can obviously make stocks susceptible to swings on seemingly minute changes in key metrics, but if you can manage that volatility, this is a growth name that we believe investors should continue to own. Reiterate BUY."

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