Sometimes industry growth predictions seem as though the analyst just took a straight line and stretched it up and to the right to indicate exponential growth. A current example is the global cloud market, which is predicted to become a $1.5 trillion opportunity, growing at a compound annual rate of nearly 16% through 2030.
In this case, current predictions might actually hit their mark. There are massive forces behind this market's expansion that could push it to these heights, such as the continuous growth in the number of businesses moving their data to the cloud. They're going to need the infrastructure to enable the transfer as well as the capabilities to access, maintain, and analyze it.
And it's going to require corporate IT budgets to swell to meet the challenge, which is why the two stocks below are among the best cloud stocks to buy in July.
Image source: Getty Images.
1. Amazon
These days, Amazon (AMZN -1.90%) gets as much recognition for its cloud business, Amazon Web Services (AWS), as it does for its e-commerce operations. It might be better known for the latter, but AWS has been the power and profit center driving Amazon's growth for a while now.
Revenue in the cloud business jumped 37% last year, hitting $62 billion as more customers used more of its services -- and this pace shows no sign of slowing. Revenue was up another 37% in the first quarter of this year and will likely expand as AWS increases its own capabilities.
Amazon has launched 16 "local zones" or what it says is a type of infrastructure deployment that puts storage, database, and other AWS services closer to large population, industry, or information technology centers. This will help AWS customers build applications that globally deliver split-second latency -- or the time it takes for a packet of data to travel from source to a destination -- at the edge of the cloud, critical services for streaming video, online gaming, and augmented and virtual reality.
AWS is already the dominant cloud-infrastructure leader with a 33% share of the market, while Microsoft's Azure is further back with a 21% share, and Alphabet's Google Cloud is a distant third with an 8% share.
With Amazon's stock down 30% this year and off 40% from its high, this represents a discounted opportunity (with an e-commerce kicker to juice results) as Wall Street estimates the tech giant will grow earnings at a 40% clip over the next five years.
2. Snowflake
Snowflake (SNOW -1.92%) might seem like just another data warehousing stock, but it actually has a competitive edge because it breaks down the silos between computing and storage. Its advanced platform automatically scales so that customers are only paying for the workload they need, unlike most other providers who scale based on the largest workload.
All of this means that its customers save money. Snowflake allows its customers to warehouse their data in one place while right-sizing their computing needs independently. The company's technology is built on top of various popular cloud services, enabling companies to share their data even if they're not using the same infrastructure service providers.
Business is growing, and dramatically so. Snowflake's revenue more than doubled last year to $1.14 billion, generating an adjusted profit margin of 74%. It also is not taking a breather as first-quarter revenue was up 85% year over year, while its net revenue retention rate (or how much more a customer spends with the company than in a previous period) was 174%, on par with the 178% rate it recorded for all of 2021.
Snowflake has lost over half its value this year, but with analysts forecasting revenue growing from $1.2 billion last year to $10.2 billion in 2027 -- or a 53% compound annual rate -- there's plenty of long-term upside ahead.
